HQ Team
February 27, 2025: The uniformity of brain folding in the mid-frontal area suggests a developmental trait common to people with schizophrenia, a study by the University of Zurich found.
As brain folding is largely completed in early childhood, brain development during this period appears to be less flexible in schizophrenia patients, particularly in areas responsible for linking thinking and feeling processes, the authors wrote in the American Journal of Psychiatry.
The surface of the brain normally has many ridges or folds called gyri.
The folded shape of the human brain allows the cerebral cortex, the thin outer layer of neurons and their associated projections, to attain a large surface area relative to brain volume.
The overall degree of cortical folding or gyrification in the brain has been associated with cognitive ability across species in a general sense. It signifies neural processing power.
The symptoms of schizophrenia vary greatly from person to person, and the new study shows how these differences manifest themselves in the structure of the brain.
Schizophrenia is a complex mental health condition that affects perception, thought, and emotions. This complexity is reflected in the individual manifestations of the disease: for some patients, perceptual disturbances are the main problem, while for others, cognitive impairments are more prevalent.
“In this sense, there is not one schizophrenia, but many, each with different neurobiological profiles,” said Wolfgang Omlor, first author of the study and senior physician at the University Hospital of Psychiatry Zurich.
To do justice to each of these types of schizophrenia, a precision medicine approach would have to be adopted – for example, with therapies that precisely match the respective neurobiological profile.
“This requires approaches that look for both individual differences and similarities at the neurobiological level,” Omlor said.
In an international multicenter study, Omlor and the research team at the University of Zurich examined the variability of brain structure in patients with schizophrenia.
They analysed which brain networks show a high degree of individuality and which a high degree of similarity. The researchers examined several characteristics, including the thickness and surface area of the cerebral cortex, as well as the folding pattern and volume of deeper brain regions.
The cerebral cortex, also called gray matter, is the brain’s outermost layer of nerve cell tissue. It has many folds and grooves. It plays a key role in thinking, learning, reasoning, problem-solving, emotions, consciousness, and functions related to senses.
The researchers gleaned data from the ENIGMA collaboration, an international research project that combined imaging data from more than 6,000 people in 22 countries.
By comparing the brain structures of several thousand patients with schizophrenia and healthy individuals, the variability of brain structure was studied with a high degree of reliability.
“These findings broaden our understanding of the neurobiological basis of schizophrenia,” says Philipp Homan professor at the University of Zurich and corresponding author of the study.
“While uniform brain folding may indicate possible mechanisms of disease development, regions with high variability in brain structure may be relevant for the development of individualized treatment strategies.”
