During the initial period of funding of this grant, using a combination of magnetic source imaging (MSI) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), we have found persuasive evidence of anomalous lateralization of both function and structure in the superior temporal gyrus (STG) in paranoid schizophrenic disorders. We have found that such alterations are differentially expressed in male and female schizophrenic subjects. Male patients are less lateralized than male controls; female patients are more lateralized than female controls. Preliminary findings suggest as well a fundamental abnormality of early memory systems, including the echoic trace itself, at the level of the primary auditory cortex in our schizophrenic subjects. We now request an additional five years of funding to determine whether our structural and functional findings are in some way unique to the population we have studied to date, or whether they may in fact be more generally descriptive of schizophrenic disorders of other subtypes, and/or perhaps the psychoses as a continuum. We will therefore study an adult population of males and females with psychoses (schizophrenia of both paranoid and non-paranoid subtypes, schizoaffective, and bipolar disorder) and normal controls. Using MSI and MRI, we will establish whether anomalous lateralization of the brain is seen in other psychoses, and in brain regions other than temporal lobe in schizophrenic patients. Using functional MEG metrics, we will quantify the type and degree of early auditory memory abnormalities, at both the level of the echoic trace and auditory working memory scanning and retrieval. We will relate these measures to temporal lobe structural differences, alterations in neuropsychological evaluations of attention and memory, and psychophysical experiments. High spatial density EEG recordings will also be obtained to determine if EEG, properly performed, can provide localization accuracy the same as, or similar to that of MEG.
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