Browsing by Author "Castro, Mariana N."
Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
Results Per Page
Sort Options
- ItemAbnormal brain network community structure related to psychological stress in schizophrenia(2023) Castro, Mariana N.; Bocaccio, Hernan; De Pino, Gabriela; Sanchez, Stella M.; Wainsztein, Agustina E.; Drucaroff, Lucas; Costanzo, Elsa Y.; Crossley, Nicolás; Villarreal, Mirta F.; Guinjoan, Salvador M.Recent functional imaging studies in schizophrenia consistently report a disruption of brain connectivity. However, most of these studies analyze the brain connectivity during resting state. Since psychological stress is a major factor for the emergence of psychotic symptoms, we sought to characterize the brain connectivity reconfiguration induced by stress in schizophrenia. We tested the hypothesis that an alteration of the brain's integration-segregation dynamic could be the result of patients with schizophrenia facing psychological stress. To this end, we studied the modular organization and the reconfiguration of networks induced by a stress paradigm in forty subjects (twenty patients and twenty controls), thus analyzing the dynamics of the brain in terms of integration and segregation processes by using 3T-fMRI. Patients with schizophrenia did not show statistically significant differences during the control task compared with controls, but they showed an abnormal community structure during stress condition and an under-connected reconfiguration network with a reduction of hub nodes, suggesting a deficit of integration dynamic with a greater compromise of the right hemisphere. These results provide evidence that schizophrenia has a normal response to undemanding stimuli but shows a disruption of brain functional connectivity between key regions involved in stress response, potentially leading to altered functional brain dynamics by reducing integration capacity and showing deficits recruiting right hemisphere regions. This could in turn underlie the hyper-sensitivity to stress characteristic of schizophrenia.
- ItemCountry-level gender inequality is associated with structural differences in the brains of women and men(National Academy of Sciences, 2023) Zugman, Andrés; Alliende, Luz María; Medel Sierralta, Vicente Nicolás; Bethlehem, Richard A. I.; Seidlitz, Jakob; Ringlein, Grace; Arango, Celso; Arnatkeviciutė, Aurina; Asmal, Laila; Bellgrove, Mark; Benegal, Vivek; Bernardo, Miquel; Billeke, Pablo; Bosch-Bayard, Jorge; Bressan, Rodrigo; Busatto, Geraldo F.; Castro, Mariana N.; Chaim-Avancini, Tiffany; Compte, Albert; Costanzi, Monise; Czepielewski, Leticia; Dazzan, Paola; Fuente-Sandoval, Camilo de la; Forti, Marta di; Díaz-Caneja, Covadonga M.; Díaz-Zuluaga, Ana María; Plessis, Stefan du; Duran, Fabio L. S.; Fittipaldi, Sol; Fornito, Alex; Freimer, Nelson B.; Gadelha, Ary; Gama, Clarissa S.; Garani, Ranjini; García-Rizo, Clemente; González Campo, Cecilia; González-Valderrama, Alfonso; Guinjoan, Salvador; Holla, Bharath; Ibáñez, Agustín; Jackowski, Andrea; Ivanovic, Daniza; León-Ortiz, Pablo; Lochner, Christine; López Jaramillo, Carlos; Luckhoff, Hilmar; Massuda, Raffael; McGuire, Philip; Miyata, Jun; Mizrahi, Romina; Murray, Robin; Ozerdem, Aysegul; Pan, Pedro M.; Parellada, Mara; Phahladira, Lebogan; Ramírez Mahaluf, Juan P.; Reckziegel, Ramiro; Marques Tiago Reis; Reyes-Madrigal, Francisco; Roos, Annerine; Rosa, Pedro; Salum, Giovanni; Scheffler, Freda; Schumann, Gunter; Serpa, Mauricio; Stein, Dan J.; Tepper, Angeles; Tiego, Jeggan; Ueno, Tsukasa; Undurraga, Juan; Undurraga, Eduardo A.; Valdés-Sosa, Pedro; Valli, Isabel; Villarreal, Mirta; Winton-Brown, Toby T.; Yalin, Nefize; Zamorano, Francisco; Zanetti, Marcus V.; Veda, C.; Winkler, Anderson M.; Pine, Daniel S.; Evans-Lacko, Sara; Crossley Karmelic, Nicolas AndrésGender inequality across the world has been associated with a higher risk to mental health problems and lower academic achievement in women compared to men. We also know that the brain is shaped by nurturing and adverse socio-environmental experiences. Therefore, unequal exposure to harsher conditions for women compared to men in gender-unequal countries might be reflected in differences in their brain structure, and this could be the neural mechanism partly explaining women’s worse outcomes in gender-unequal countries. We examined this through a random-effects meta-analysis on cortical thickness and surface area differences between adult healthy men and women, including a meta-regression in which country-level gender inequality acted as an explanatory variable for the observed differences. A total of 139 samples from 29 different countries, totaling 7,876 MRI scans, were included. Thickness of the right hemisphere, and particularly the right caudal anterior cingulate, right medial orbitofrontal, and left lateral occipital cortex, presented no differences or even thicker regional cortices in women compared to men in gender-equal countries, reversing to thinner cortices in countries with greater gender inequality. These results point to the potentially hazardous effect of gender inequality on women’s brains and provide initial evidence for neuroscience-informed policies for gender equality.
- ItemStructural brain abnormalities in schizophrenia in adverse environments: Examining the effect of poverty and violence in six Latin American cities(2021) Crossley Karmelic, Nicolás Andrés; Zugman, Andre; Reyes-Madrigal, Francisco; Czepielewski, Leticia S.; Castro, Mariana N.; Díaz-Zuluaga, Ana M.; Pineda-Zapata, Julián A.; Reckziegel, Ramiro; Noto, Cristiano; Jackowski, Andrea; Alliende, Luz M.; Iruretagoyena, Bárbara; Ossandon, Tomás; Ramirez-Mahaluf, Juan P.; Castañeda, Carmen; González-Valderrama, Alfonso; Nachar, Rubén; León-Ortiz, Pablo; Undurraga, Juan; López-Jaramillo, Carlos; Guinjoan, Salvador; Gama, Clarissa; Fuente-Sandoval, Camilo de la; Bressan, RodrigoBackground: Social and environmental factors such as poverty or violence modulate the risk and course of schizophrenia. However, how they affect the brain in patients with psychosis remains unclear. Aims: We studied how environmental factors are related to brain structure in patients with schizophrenia and controls in Latin America, where these factors are large and unequally distributed. Method: This is a multicentre study of magnetic resonance imaging in patients with schizophrenia andcontrols fromsixLatinAmerican cities. Total and voxel-level grey matter volumes, and their relationship with neighbourhood characteristics such as average income and homicide rates, were analysed with a general linear model. Results: Atotal of 334 patients with schizophrenia and 262 controls were included. Income was differentially related to total grey matter volume in both groups (P=0.006). Controls showed a positive correlation between total grey matter volume and The risk of developing schizophrenia is modulated, among other factors, by the social and environmental context of where people live. Incidence rates of psychosis are different across countries,1 possibly reflecting variations in the environment. Proposed specific factors explaining this effect have included an urban upbringing,2 poverty3 and the neighbourhood crime rate.4 Where people live has also been related to recovery rates of schizophrenia, in the context of whether it is a low- or high-income country5 or experiencing periods of economic expansion or recession.6 Brain imaging studies have shown that many of these environmental factors are related to brain changes in healthy individuals. For example, young people raised in poverty in high-income countries show reductions in total brain grey matter.7 Exposure to childhood adversity and violence has also been related to differences in hippocampal and amygdala volumes.8 An unresolved question relates to how these environmental factors affect the biology of schizophrenia. Couldbraindifferences typically seen in patients with schizophrenia be accounted for by these environmental factors? How will the neuropathology of schizophrenia interact with brain changes related to the environment? Is there a double-hit situation, where * Joint last authors. 112 income(R=0.14, P=0.02). Surprisingly, this relationship was not present in patients with schizophrenia (R=−0.076, P=0.17). Voxel-level analysis confirmed that this interaction was widespread across the cortex. After adjusting for global brain changes, income was positively related to prefrontal cortex volumes only in controls. Conversely, the hippocampus in patients with schizophrenia, but not in controls, was relatively larger in affluent environments. There was no significant correlation between environmental violence and brain structure.