A comprehensive analysis of the ongoing studies will help depict a clearer picture of what current science knows about AHs in schizophrenia. Notwithstanding, the possible mechanism remains unclear, and the existing findings are divergent to some extent.
AHs are a main positive symptom of schizophrenia ( American Psychiatric Association, 2013) and can bring severe damage to one’s mental health, for instance, increasing depressive symptoms ( Chiang et al., 2018) and leading to suicidal ideation or attempt ( Koyanagi et al., 2015).Īs to the etiology, the past decades have witnessed a rapid growth in clinical studies investigating the genetic and neural substrates for AHs generally and the verbal type specifically in schizophrenia. AHs are most commonly found in major psychotic disorders, with the lifetime prevalence rate of 60-80% in schizophrenia spectrum disorders ( Lim et al., 2016), and 1-year prevalence rate of 50-70% in schizophrenia specifically ( Bauer et al., 2011 Waters et al., 2014). With nearly 10% of lifetime prevalence rate among the general population ( Maijer et al., 2018), this debilitating symptom occurs among healthy population, as well as people with various clinical conditions such as psychiatric diseases (including schizophrenia, mood disorders, dissociative disorders, etc.), neurological diseases, and hearing impairment ( Laroi et al., 2012). More solid and comparable research is needed to replicate and integrate ongoing findings from multidimensional levels.Īuditory hallucinations (AHs) are defined as experiences that without an external stimulus, individuals perceive voices as distinct from their own thoughts, whether the voices are familiar or not ( American Psychiatric Association, 2013). Main findings include gene polymorphisms, glutamate level change, electroencephalographic alterations, and abnormalities of white matter fasciculi, cortical structure, and cerebral activities, especially in multiple regions, including auditory and language networks. In this review, we intend to offer a comprehensive summary of current findings related to AHs in schizophrenia from aspects of genetics and transcriptome, neurophysiology (neurometabolic and electroencephalogram studies), and neuroimaging (structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging studies and transcriptome–neuroimaging association study). Previous studies have shown that AHs in schizophrenia vary from those in other disorders, suggesting that they have unique features and possibly distinguishable mechanisms worthy of further investigation. Enormous efforts have been made to unveil the etiology of auditory hallucinations (AHs), and multiple genetic and neural factors have already been shown to have their own roles.
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