Objectives: Brain structure changes in schizophrenia (SZ) have been a focus for recent decades. Yet such researches, especially those on gray and white matters in Vietnamese SZ patients, still parsimonious. The present study concerned changes of brain structures including gray and white matters in SZ. | TẠP CHÍ Y - DƢỢC HỌC QUÂN SỰ SỐ CHUYÊN ĐỀ HÌNH THÁI HỌC-2017 GRAY AND WHITE MATTER REDUCTION IN SCHIZOPHRENIA PATIENTS Dang Tien Truong*; Nguyen Duy Bac*; Tran Ngoc Anh*; Tran Hai Anh* SUMMARY Objectives: Brain structure changes in schizophrenia (SZ) have been a focus for recent decades. Yet such researches, especially those on gray and white matters in Vietnamese SZ patients, still parsimonious. The present study concerned changes of brain structures including gray and white matters in SZ. Subjects and methods: Participants included 39 patients with SZ and 40 healthy control individuals, they were underwent tesla MRI. Automated segmentation of brain structures was performed using FreeSurfer software. Results: There was a significant reduction in total brain with ventricles, total brain with ventricles/ICV ratio, total brain without ventricles, and gray and white matters in SZ patients, but an enlargement of ventricles comparing to those in controls. Conclusion: Our results of MRI study in Vietnamese people support a notion of the reduction of gray and white matters and of brain volume in SZ. * Keywords: Schizophrenia; MRI; Brain structure. INTRODUCTION Schizophrenia is a mental disorder with variations in symptoms and pathophysiology, but its etiology still remains largely unclear [1]. The disease is characterized by alterations in cognition, motivation, memory, and social communications. Research interest in investigating brain abnormalities in SZ thus paled until 1976, when the first computed tomography showed enlarged lateral ventricles in SZ and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies followed [12]. MRI has been a powerful tool for visualizing soft tissue contrast in the brain and no known adverse effects. Hence, there have been a plentiful number of studies using MRI with higher resolution [2, 3], which report morphologic abnormalities of the brain in SZ [5, 7], the correlation of symptoms and brain changes [5, 6, 11], and between cognitive functions
