RESUMO
Objective To investigate the morphological abnormalities of the brain cortex in schizophrenic patients and their parents. Methods We recruited 33 schizophrenic patients, 63 their unaffected biological parents. Thirty well matched healthy controls served as control group 1 (for patients), and 28 well matched healthy controls as control group 2 (for parents). The high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and Freesurfer software were used to measure the gray matter volume, cortical thickness, cortical surface area, curvature and volume of subcortical regions on all the sub-jects. Results The patients demonstrated significant reduction of cortical thickness in the left middle-anterior cingulate, middle occipital gyrus, inferior circular sulcus of the insula, lateral occipito-temporal sulcus, the right lateral occipito-temporal gyrus, middle temporal gyrus, superior circular sulcus of the insula, inferior temporal sulcus, the bilateral poste-rior-dorsalcingulated gyrus and superior temporal sulcus (P<6.0×10-4,corrected by Bonferroni method). Compared with control group 2, the unaffected parents exhibited slight reduction of cortical in the left subcentral, triangular part of the in-ferior frontal gyrus, middle frontal gyrus, superior circular sulcus of the insula, occipital pole, inferior frontal sulcus, mid-dle occipital sulcus and lunatus sulcus, lateral orbital sulcus, the right middle occipital gyrus, lingual gyrus, posterior lat- eral sulcus and inferior precentral sulcus, but the reduction was not significant after correction for multiple comparisons. Conclusions Our results indicate that cortical thickness can specifically reflect the brain morphological abnormalities of schizophrenia and the reduction of cortical thicknes may be a heritable phenotype of schizophrenia.