Schizophrenia Ages the Brain in Several Ways

Patients with schizophrenia have smaller brains, even before illness onset, with reductions in both white and gray matter. Smaller gray-matter volumes, associated with outcome and becoming more pronounced during the course of illness, have been inconsistently linked to degree of psychosis, medication use, relapses, cannabis use, and individual genetic vulnerabilities. To better delineate these relationships, researchers used machine-learning algorithms to determine brain aging on magnetic resonance imaging scans in 341 patients with schizophrenia and 386 controls (baseline age range, 16–67) in a longitudinal study; 192 patients and 186 controls had ≥1 follow-up scan 1 to 13 years after baseline (total of 1197 scans).

Based on baseline gray-m…