Anterior Cingulate Activation During Stroop Task Performance: A PET to MRI Coregistration Study of Individual Patients With Schizophrenia

OBJECTIVE: The authors used single-subject functional imaging analyses to 1) corroborate the findings of anterior cingulate hypoperfusion during an attentional task in schizophrenia and 2) examine whether anterior cingulate activation is associated with underlying morphology. METHOD: Five healthy subjects and six patients with schizophrenia underwent positron emission tomography scanning while they performed the Stroop task. The medial-frontal lobes were masked out for analysis, and activation peaks were individually coregistered to each subject’s magnetic resonance imaging scan. RESULTS: Healthy subjects showed activations in both limbic and paralimbic anterior cingulate regions. Patients with schizophrenia showed only paralimbic activations, and these were apparent only in patients having a paracingulate sulcus. CONCLUSIONS: These findings suggest that 1) patients with schizophrenia have limbic-anterior cingulate hypoperfusion during attentional tasks and 2) paralimbic activation is associated with underlying morphology.