Regional cerebral blood flow or rCBF is a measurement of blood circulation levels to specific areas of the brain using transcranial sonography by BIOSS (Russia).
In the study conducted by our Research Center blood flow to the DLPFC was investigated in 70 schizophrenic patients and 65 non schizophrenics.
All participants were subjected to three separate conditions or tasks in which rCBF in brain blood vessels were determined. We investigated indexes of line blood speed Front (FBA), Middle(MBA), Posterior brain arteries (PBA)
The first of the three psychometric tasks was labeled the resting condition. This condition allowed participants to become acclimated with the experimental conditions. The next two conditions were counterbalanced among the participants in random order to discount the possible effect of task order on results.
We conduct a study to control for all the possible confounds of past research on working memory and the DLPFC. This task required the participants to identify the digit initially presented zero, one, two, or three frames before the one currently viewable.
As the working memory load became larger, activation levels of the DLPFC between increasingly differed between groups. Our study suggest that there is a significant role of the DLPFC in working memory, correlating its activation negatively with cognitive disorganization, a symptom of schizophrenia possibly responsible for many of the negative symptoms. These results clearly suggest working memory and the right DLPFC dysfunction as playing significant roles in schizophrenic symptoms.