Altered cerebellar GABA-mediated cerebral functional networks in patients with schizophrenia: A transcranial magnetic stimulation study

To investigate the cerebellar GABA-mediated cerebral functional networks, we measured cerebellar basal and stimulus-activated GABA content in schizophrenia patients (SCZ) and healthy controls (HC) with cerebellar transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). We utilized graph theory to calculate global and regional property changes of cerebral functional networks and their correlations with cerebellar GABA at baseline and after TMS. The results show significant increase of the global efficiency, nodal clustering coefficient of left ventral attention network (VAN) after TMS in SCZ. This provides new molecular evidence for neuropathology of cerebellum dysfunction in SCZ and reveal potential interaction with cerebral functional networks.