Schizophrenia (SCZ) is a disabling psychiatric disorder characterized by positive symptoms, such as hallucinations and delusions, negative symptoms, such as decreased expression ability, and cognitive defects, such as impaired executive function and memory ability. Excessive oxidative stress and dysregulated antioxidant defense system have been proposed to be important risk factors for SCZ. The activities of superoxide dismutase (SOD), an important antioxidant enzyme, were found to be abnormal in SCZ patients.

Previous studies have shown sex differences in disease risk, course and outcome of SCZ. Moreover, some animal studies have reported sex differences in oxidative stress markers. However, no studies have explored the sex difference in the association between SOD activity and clinical symptoms in patients with SCZ.

Recently, Dr. WANG Dongmei and her colleagues under the guidance of Professor ZHANG Xiangyang from CAS Key Laboratory of Mental Health, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, explored the sex differences in clinical characteristics and SOD activity as well as their relationship in never-treated first-episode (NTFE) patients with SCZ in the Han Chinese population. 165 NTFE patients with SCZ and 133 healthy controls were recruited. Further, researchers examined their total SOD and manganese SOD (MnSOD) activities, and evaluated the psychopathological symptoms by a five-factor model of the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS).

The results showed that depressive factor was positively correlated with MnSOD and total SOD activity in male patients, while PANSS positive symptom was independently correlated with MnSOD activity in female patients. This study suggested that there were sex differences in the association between SOD activity and clinical phenotype in NTFE patients with SCZ, sex is one of the important factors in evaluating the relationship between antioxidant activity and clinical psychopathological symptoms in patients with SCZ.

This work was published online in The World Journal of Biological Psychiatry on August 27th, 2020, entitled “Sex differences in the association between symptoms and superoxide dismutase in patients with never-treated first-episode schizophrenia”. It was funded by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2017YFC1310405), related CAS Program, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (81371477) and the CAS Key Lab of Mental Health.

Fig 1. Sex differences in the correlation between total SOD activity and depressive factor (Image by WANG Dongmei)

Fig 2. Sex differences in the correlation between MnSOD activity and clinical symptoms (Image by WANG Dongmei)