ArticleMolecular psychiatry2021
Increased levels of midbrain immune-related transcripts in schizophrenia and in murine offspring after maternal immune activation.
Article in Molecular psychiatry, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 70 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
70 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 129 citations in OpenAlex.
- Chemokine Dysregulation and Neuroinflammation in Schizophrenia: A Systematic Review.International journal of molecular sciences · 2023Pooled it
- Linking Inflammation, Aberrant Glutamate-Dopamine Interaction, and Post-synaptic Changes: Translational Relevance for Schizophrenia and Antipsychotic Treatment: a Systematic Review.Molecular neurobiology · 2022Pooled it
- Association of Peripheral Blood Levels of Cytokines With Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Meta-Analysis.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2021Pooled it
- Altered Vascular and Angiogenic Transcripts in the Neurogenic Niche in Neuroinflammatory-Type Schizophrenia.Schizophrenia bulletin · 2026Article
- TRPV1 Suppresses Microglial Inflammatory Activation to Ameliorate Schizophrenia-Associated Behaviors in Maternal Separation Rats.Schizophrenia bulletin · 2026Article
- Astroglial disinhibition of cortical circuits disrupts cognition via kynurenic acid in mice.Nature communications · 2026Article
- A prototype-augmented graph representation learning framework for identifying brain disorder-associated genes and facilitating drug repurposing.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Mesocorticostriatal Reinforcement Learning of State Representation and Value with Implications for the Mechanisms of Schizophrenia.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Maternal immune activation with high molecular weight poly (I:C) induces selective depressive-like phenotype in adult offspring.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- Increased Tumor Necrosis Factor Superfamily Members in Neuroinflammatory Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder Midbrains.Biological psychiatry global open science · 2026Article
- A Comprehensive Analysis of Inflammation Regulatory Biomarkers among three Neuropsychiatric Disorders using Transcriptomic Approach.Neuroinformatics · 2026Article
- Perinatal hyperandrogenization and immune activation in rodents model subtypes of autism.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- CD163+ perivascular macrophages in schizophrenia: a research framework for testing macrophage-related mechanisms.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2026Article
- The dopaminergic system in neurodevelopment: preclinical models of neurodevelopmental disorders and susceptibility to neurodegeneration.Frontiers in cellular neuroscience · 2026Review
- Oxidative Stress-Mediated Neuroinflammation in the Pathophysiology of Schizophrenia.International journal of molecular sciences · 2025Review
- The Role of Prenatal Microglial Activation and Its Sex Differences in the Development of Neuropsychiatric Disorders and Neurodegenerative Diseases.International journal of molecular sciences · 2025Review
- Molecular Evidence for Altered Angiogenesis in Neuroinflammation-Associated Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder Implicate an Abnormal Midbrain Blood-Brain Barrier.Schizophrenia bulletin · 2025Article
- Transcriptional evidence of reduced BDNF trophic capacity in the post-mortem human midbrain of schizophrenia cases with high inflammation.Translational psychiatry · 2025Article
- Involvement of virus infections and antiviral agents in schizophrenia.Psychological medicine · 2025Review
- Maternal immune activation followed by peripubertal stress combinedly produce reactive microglia and confine cerebellar cognition.Communications biology · 2025Article
10 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
9 authors at 5 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The pathophysiology of dopamine dysregulation in schizophrenia involves alterations at the ventral midbrain level. Given that inflammatory mediators such as cytokines influence the functional properties of midbrain dopamine neurons, midbrain inflammation may play a role in schizophrenia by contributing to presynaptic dopamine abnormalities. Thus, we quantified inflammatory markers in dopaminergic areas of the midbrain of people with schizophrenia and matched controls. We also measured these markers in midbrain of mice exposed to maternal immune activation (MIA) during pregnancy, an established risk factor for schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders. We found diagnostic increases in SERPINA3, TNFα, IL1β, IL6, and IL6ST transcripts in schizophrenia compared with controls (p < 0.02-0.001). The diagnostic differences in these immune markers were accounted for by a subgroup of schizophrenia cases (~ 45%, 13/28) showing high immune status. Consistent with the human cohort, we identified increased expression of immune markers in the midbrain of adult MIA offspring (SERPINA3, TNFα, and IL1β mRNAs, all p ≤ 0.01), which was driven by a subset of MIA offspring (~ 40%, 13/32) with high immune status. There were no diagnostic (human cohort) or group-wise (mouse cohort) differences in cellular markers indexing the density and/or morphology of microglia or astrocytes, but an increase in the transcription of microglial and astrocytic markers in schizophrenia cases and MIA offspring with high inflammation. These data demonstrate that immune-related changes in schizophrenia extend to dopaminergic areas of the midbrain and exist in the absence of changes in microglial cell number, but with putative evidence of microglial and astrocytic activation in the high immune subgroup. MIA may be one of the contributing factors underlying persistent neuroimmune changes in the midbrain of people with schizophrenia.
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