Abnormal Alpha Rhythms During Self-Referential Processing in Individuals with Schizophrenia

On February 18th, Dr. Molly Erickson presented on Alpha-band desynchronization and how it reflects memory-specific processes during visual change detection in individuals -- and its possible implications in patients with psychosis. This led me to research about what other roles Alpha-band desynchronization could play in other disorders such as schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia patients have exhibited an abnormal physiological appearance when recognizing objects that were related to themselves. This cognitive process is associated with self-referential processing and is believed to be associated with abnormal alpha rhythms in patients with schizophrenia.

In a recent study by Shikui Jia et al., the self-referential memory (SRM) task was used during the encoding phase of a task to test synchronization connectivity in 18 schizophrenia patients and 18 healthy controls. It was found that schizophrenia patients exhibited abnormal alpha-band oscillations during the self-referential condition compared to the healthy controls. There were lower time-frequency distributions over pre-frontal, parietal, and occipital regions -- regions implicated in object identification and could explain why these individuals are not able to recognize objects related to themselves.

The results of this study concluded that the SRM bias score is significantly correlated with the power of the alpha-band frequency in schizophrenia patients during the self-referential condition. As well, it was found that there was reduced connectivity during the poststimulus onset and reduced functional connectivity for the central parietal, temporal, and occipital regions during the self-referential condition in schizophrenia patients. Overall, these results are significant in understanding the role of alpha-band oscillations in schizophrenia patients and the abnormal brain networks exhibited in these patients.

Erickson MA, Smith D, Albrecht MA, Silverstein S. Alpha‐band desynchronization reflects memory‐specific processes during visual change detection. Psychophysiology. 2019;00:e13442. https://doi.org/10.1111/psyp.13442

Jia S, Liu M, Huang P, Zhao Y, Tan S, Go R, Yan T and Wu J (2019) Abnormal Alpha Rhythm During Self-Referential Processing in Schizophrenia Patients. Front. Psychiatry 10:691. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2019.00691

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2019.00691/full