White matter tracts differentially associated with auditory hallucinations in first-episode psychosis: A correlational tractography diffusion spectrum imaging study.

Auditory hallucinations (AH) are a debilitating symptom in psychosis, impacting cognition and real world functioning. Recent thought conceptualizes AH as a consequence of long-range brain communication dysfunction, or circuitopathy, within the auditory sensory/perceptual, language, and cognitive control systems. Recently we showed in first-episode psychosis (FEP) that, despite overall intact white matter integrity in the cortical-cortical and cortical-subcortical language tracts and the callosal tracts connecting auditory cortices, the severity of AH correlated inversely with white matter integrity. However, that hypothesis-driven isolation of specific tracts likely missed important white matter concomitants of AH. In this report, we used a whole-brain data-driven dimensional approach using correlational tractography to associate AH severity with white matter integrity in a sample of 175 individuals. Diffusion Spectrum Imaging (DSI) was used to image diffusion distribution. Quantitative Anisotropy (QA) in three tracts was greater with increased AH severity (FDR < 0.001) and QA in three tracts was lower with increased AH severity (FDR < 0.01). White matter tracts showing associations between QA and AH were generally associated with frontal-parietal-temporal connectivity (tracts with known relevance for cognitive control and the language system), in the cingulum bundle, and in prefrontal inter-hemispheric connectivity. The results of this whole brain data-driven analysis suggest that subtle white matter alterations connecting frontal, parietal, and temporal lobes in the service of sensory-perceptual, language/semantic, and cognitive control processes impact the expression of auditory hallucination in FEP. Disentangling the distributed neural circuits involved in AH should help to develop novel interventions, such as non-invasive brain stimulation.

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Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.