The Relationship Between Inflammation, Cognitive Impairments, and Neuroimaging Data in Schizophrenia

Objective. To seek relationships between results from functional brain imaging, immunological indicators, and laboratory markers of neuroinflammation in schizophrenia taking account of cognitive impairments in patients in relation to the potential for creating an interdisciplinary approach to the diagnosis, treatment, and prognostication of disease. Materials and methods. A total of 25 patients with schizophrenia (study group) and 13 healthy subjects (control group) took part in the study. Patients’ mental health was evaluated with a variety of psychometric scales. The main measures of humoral immunity, levels of inflammation markers, key cytokines, and growth factor VEGF were determined by ELISA and patients underwent brain MRI. All tractographic data were loaded into a connectome database to study the effects of the concentrations of immunological markers and the severity of cognitive impairments. Results and conclusions. A relationship was found between immunological parameters and the coefficient of quantitative anisotropy in the corpus callosum in schizophrenia. The results also provide evidence of the possible value of measures of activation of humoral immune responses and systemic inflammation as markers of neurophysiological changes and cognitive dysfunction in schizophrenia.