title: Atypical visual and somatosensory adaptation in schizophrenia-spectrum disorders.
abstract: Neurophysiological investigations in patients with schizophrenia consistently show early sensory processing deficits in the visual system. Importantly, comparable sensory deficits have also been established in healthy first-degree biological relatives of patients with schizophrenia and in first-episode drug-naive patients. The clear implication is that these measures are endophenotypic, related to the underlying genetic liability for schizophrenia. However, there is significant overlap between patient response distributions and those of healthy individuals without affected first-degree relatives. Here we sought to develop more sensitive measures of sensory dysfunction in this population, with an eye to establishing endophenotypic markers with better predictive capabilities. We used a sensory adaptation paradigm in which electrophysiological responses to basic visual and somatosensory stimuli presented at different rates (ranging from 250 to 2550 ms interstimulus intervals, in blocked presentations) were compared. Our main hypothesis was that adaptation would be substantially diminished in schizophrenia, and that this would be especially prevalent in the visual system. High-density event-related potential recordings showed amplitude reductions in sensory adaptation in patients with schizophrenia (N=15 Experiment 1, N=12 Experiment 2) compared with age-matched healthy controls (N=15 Experiment 1, N=12 Experiment 2), and this was seen for both sensory modalities. At the individual participant level, reduced adaptation was more robust for visual compared with somatosensory stimulation. These results point to significant impairments in short-term sensory plasticity across sensory modalities in schizophrenia. These simple-to-execute measures may prove valuable as candidate endophenotypes and will bear follow-up in future work.
authors.affiliation: The Sheryl and Daniel R. Tishman Cognitive Neurophysiology Laboratory Children's Evaluation and Rehabilitation Center, Department of Pediatrics, Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore Medical Center, Bronx, NY, USA.|Departments of Psychology and Biology, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA.
authors.forename: G N
authors.initials: GN
authors.lastname: Andrade
authors.affiliation: The Sheryl and Daniel R. Tishman Cognitive Neurophysiology Laboratory Children's Evaluation and Rehabilitation Center, Department of Pediatrics, Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore Medical Center, Bronx, NY, USA.|Trinity Centre for Bioengineering, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland.|Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland.
authors.forename: J S
authors.initials: JS
authors.lastname: Butler
authors.affiliation: The Sheryl and Daniel R. Tishman Cognitive Neurophysiology Laboratory Children's Evaluation and Rehabilitation Center, Department of Pediatrics, Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore Medical Center, Bronx, NY, USA.
authors.forename: G A
authors.initials: GA
authors.lastname: Peters
authors.affiliation: The Sheryl and Daniel R. Tishman Cognitive Neurophysiology Laboratory Children's Evaluation and Rehabilitation Center, Department of Pediatrics, Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore Medical Center, Bronx, NY, USA.|Departments of Psychology and Biology, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA.
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Molholm
authors.affiliation: The Sheryl and Daniel R. Tishman Cognitive Neurophysiology Laboratory Children's Evaluation and Rehabilitation Center, Department of Pediatrics, Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore Medical Center, Bronx, NY, USA.|Departments of Psychology and Biology, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA.|Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland.|The Dominick P. Purpura Department of Neuroscience, Rose F. Kennedy Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, NY, USA.|The Ernest J. Del Monte Institute for Neuromedicine, Department of Neuroscience, University of Rochester Medical Center, Rochester, NY, USA.
authors.forename: J J
authors.initials: JJ
authors.lastname: Foxe
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D003071:Cognition; D058068:Endophenotypes; D005073:Evoked Potentials, Somatosensory / Q000502:physiology*; D005074:Evoked Potentials, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D010812:Physical Stimulation; D011618:Psychotic Disorders / Q000503:physiopathology*; D012559:Schizophrenia / Q000503:physiopathology*; D055815:Young Adult