Greater extracellular free-water in first-episode psychosis predicts better neurocognitive functioning.

ABSTRACT: Free Water Imaging is a novel diffusion magnetic resonance (MR) imaging method that is able to separate changes affecting the extracellular space from those that reflect changes in neuronal cells and processes. A previous Free Water Imaging study in schizophrenia identified significantly greater extracellular water volume in the early stages of the disorder; however, its clinical and functional sequelae have not yet been investigated. Here, we applied Free Water Imaging to a larger cohort of 63 first-episode patients with psychosis and 70 healthy matched controls to better understand the functional significance of greater extracellular water. We used diffusion MR imaging data and the Tract-Based Spatial Statistics analytic pipeline to first analyze fractional anisotropy (FA), the most comm

SUBMITTER: Lyall AE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5617750 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature