Neural oscillations are a fundamental mechanism for enabling coordinated activity during normal brain functioning and are therefore a crucial target for schizophrenia research. Schizophrenia has been known to be associated with disturbances of neural oscillations, and these disturbances of neural oscillations could be implicated with cognitive deficit. Synchronized oscillations have been shown to establish the precision in spike timing that is crucial for use-dependent synaptic plasticity. Gamma oscillations have been proposed to represent reference signals for temporal encoding, sensory binding of features into a coherent percept, and storage and recall of information. Conversely, disruption of gamma oscillations could underlie some psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia and Alzheimer's disease. Gamma-aminobutyric acid interneurons are known to be important for the synthesis of gamma band. Among them, the fast-spiking cells that contain the calcium-binding protein parvalbumin (PV) appear to play a particularly critical role in the generation of synchronized gamma activity. Knowledge about PV neurons is insufficient yet. However, evidences for the role of gamma band impairement specific to the schizophrenia is accumulating. Through more assertive researches, we anticipate that futher roles of gamma band could be come out someday.
Alzheimer Disease ; Brain ; Electroencephalography ; gamma-Aminobutyric Acid ; Humans ; Interneurons ; Neurons ; Plastics ; Schizophrenia