Florian Schubert1, Simone Khn2, Alexander Romanowski3, Jrgen Gallinat
1Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt, Berlin, Germany; 2Psychology and Educational Sciences, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium; 3Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Charit University Medicine, Germany
Structural deficiencies in cerebellum have been associated with schizophrenia, including the schizophrenic signs of thought disorders. Since conventional whole brain voxel-based morphometry shows contradictory results for cerebellum of schizophrenics we used a cerebellum-optimized VBM procedure: the Spatially Unbiased Infratentorial toolbox, to study 29 patients and 45 controls. Patients showed reductions of GM volume in the left cerebellum Crus I/II that correlated negatively with thought disorder and positively with performance in Trail-Making Test. The failure of conventional VBM to detect such effects suggests that previous studies might have underestimated the importance of cerebellar structural deficits in schizophrenia.