AUTHOR=Zheng Leilei , Yan Weizheng , Yu Linzhen , Gao Bin , Yu Shaohua , Chen Lili , Hao Xiaoyi , Liu Han , Lin Zheng 

TITLE=Altered Effective Brain Connectivity During Habituation in First Episode Schizophrenia With Auditory Verbal Hallucinations: A Dichotic Listening EEG Study

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychiatry

VOLUME=12

YEAR=2022

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychiatry/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.731387

DOI=10.3389/fpsyt.2021.731387

ISSN=1664-0640

ABSTRACT=<p><bold>Background:</bold> Habituation is considered to have protective and filtering mechanisms. The present study is aim to find the casual relationship and mechanisms of excitatory–inhibitory (E/I) dysfunctions in schizophrenia (SCZ) via habituation.</p><p><bold>Methods:</bold> A dichotic listening paradigm was performed with simultaneous EEG recording on 22 schizophrenia patients and 22 gender- and age-matched healthy controls. Source reconstruction and dynamic causal modeling (DCM) analysis were performed to estimate the effective connectivity and casual relationship between frontal and temporal regions before and after habituation.</p><p><bold>Results:</bold> The schizophrenia patients expressed later habituation onset (<italic>p</italic> &lt; 0.01) and hyper-activity in both lateral frontal–temporal cortices than controls (<italic>p</italic> = 0.001). The patients also showed decreased top-down and bottom-up connectivity in bilateral frontal–temporal regions (<italic>p</italic> &lt; 0.01). The contralateral frontal–frontal and temporal–temporal connectivity showed a left to right decreasing (<italic>p</italic> &lt; 0.01) and right to left strengthening (<italic>p</italic> &lt; 0.01).</p><p><bold>Conclusions:</bold> The results give causal evidence for E/I imbalance in schizophrenia during dichotic auditory processing. The altered effective connectivity in frontal–temporal circuit could represent the trait bio-marker of schizophrenia with auditory hallucinations.</p>