The patients showed a significant increase in brain-PAD compared with healthy controls. After early medication, the brain-PAD of patients decreased significantly compared with baseline (P < 0.001). The fractional anisotropy value of 31/33 white matter tract features, which related to the brain-PAD scores, had significantly statistical differences before and after measurements (P < 0.05, false discovery rate corrected). Correlation analysis showed that the age gap was negatively associated with the positive score on the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale in the principal data-set (r = -0.326, P = 0.014).
Conclusions: The brain age of patients with first-episode schizophrenia may be older than their chronological age. Early medication holds promise for improving the patient’s brain ageing. Neuroimaging-based brain-age prediction can provide novel insights into the understanding of schizophrenia.
They looked at healthy people of the same age and compared them to people with schizophrenia. So like looking at a healthy person’s 20 year old brain vs a person with schizophrenia’s 20 year old brain. They found the markers that normally indicate brain age greater in the diagnosed group.
This is kind of like saying people with osteoporosis have greater bone age markers than people of the same age who don’t have osteoporosis.
They’ve found this before, but this study focuses on new onset and the effect of medication partially reversing the age markers. This is good, because it shows the medication helped partially reverse the brain age markers, rather than making them worse.