TL; DR
Despite growing awareness of mental health conditions, schizophrenia often still befuddles patients and mental health professionals alike. And this condition is not uncommon: A meta-analysis released in 2026 found that the lifetime prevalence of schizophrenia is 0.62% in the general population and 10.02% in homeless populations.
Schizophrenia symptoms can be confusing, inconsistent, and highly individualized. Meanwhile, standard diagnosis still relies heavily on conventional methods such as observing symptoms and conducting interviews. The good news is, cutting-edge tools such as brain SPECT scans may help.
Can a brain scan show schizophrenia? Promising new research indicates that tools such as SPECT can help when used as part of a comprehensive analysis. When researchers employed a fully automated, fMRI-guided SPECT method, they found widespread brain-network disruptions in schizophrenia that match the patterns fMRI researchers have reported for years.
In this blog, you will learn what brain networks were shown as disrupted in schizophrenia cases, why SPECT is useful in a clinical setting, and how observing these patterns can guide more personalized, brain-based care.
In cases of schizophrenia, researchers have observed that the brain doesn’t only have isolated problems in one spot—instead, there are widespread communication issues across networks.
Like any mental health condition, schizophrenia is a complicated disorder with many potential contributing factors. Moreover, schizophrenia spectrum disorders often overlap with other mental health conditions, making accurate diagnosis and treatment even more complex. But SPECT has long been used as a tool for complex cases, and it differs from other brain scans, such as functional MRI (fMRI).
In this new research, fully automated SPECT analysis found fifteen brain networks disrupted in schizophrenia, especially those involved in cognitive control and default mode functioning. The patterns mirror what fMRI researchers have documented for years, but SPECT makes them visible in everyday clinical settings.
How SPECT shows schizophrenia brain networks points to promising possibilities for the future of schizophrenia diagnosis, effective care, and further research
Schizophrenia remains a complex disorder with no consensus biomarker, method, or test that uniquely identifies it. But researchers have long used brain scans like fMRI and SPECT to understand how the brain works in individuals with mental health conditions.
These tools can be used together. The fMRI scan looks at changes in oxygen levels in the blood to map brain activity and has been especially helpful in identifying “brain networks,” which are groups of regions that work together. SPECT, on the other hand, measures blood flow in the brain, which is another way of seeing how different areas of the brain are working (or not working well).
Both methods show that brain activity is closely tied to behavior and symptoms. Historically, however, fMRI has been used primarily to study whole-brain networks, while SPECT has more often focused on activity changes within specific brain regions.
What does schizophrenia look like on a brain scan? In cases of schizophrenia, researchers have observed that the brain doesn’t only have isolated problems in one spot. Instead, there are widespread communication issues across networks.
These patterns correspond to common schizophrenia symptoms. Individuals with this condition may experience symptoms such as:
People with schizophrenia may not be aware they have a mental health disorder. In addition, there are five subtypes of schizophrenia, and a person can shift from one subtype to another during the course of the condition.
Related: A Quick Guide to the Many Faces of Schizophrenia
Despite years of research, there’s still no single biomarker or definitive biological test that can diagnose schizophrenia. Scientists are exploring whether patterns in brain activity, especially how brain networks connect and communicate, could eventually help.
Brain imaging is not a standalone diagnostic shortcut, but it can reveal meaningful differences in brain function, connectivity, and perfusion (blood flow) that help researchers and clinicians better understand the disorder. This new SPECT study points toward possible biomarkers for schizophrenia, including disrupted blood flow and altered brain network connectivity.
The study aimed to close an important gap by applying a modern, automated network-analysis method—originally developed for fMRI—to SPECT scans. The goal was to see whether SPECT could detect the same types of network disruptions that fMRI researchers have identified for years, especially in areas involved in hearing, internal thought processes, and deeper brain structures.
Why does this matter for patients and families? It reinforces an important truth: schizophrenia symptoms are real, biological, and increasingly visible in the brain. This approach could make it easier to study brain network problems in everyday clinical settings and move researchers closer to a more precise, biology-based understanding of this often misunderstood condition.
Here are the exciting finding in the new SPECT study.
Advanced analysis tools allowed researchers to break brain activity down into different networks and examine how those networks communicate with each other. These methods have been widely used in fMRI research for years and are now being applied to SPECT scans in more advanced and clinically useful ways.
n this study, the research team used a sophisticated automated system to map brain networks from SPECT scans using patterns previously identified through fMRI research. Earlier brain-imaging studies had already linked schizophrenia symptoms to disrupted communication in areas involved in language, memory, perception, and internal thought processing.
For example, brain regions involved in hearing and language often function differently in people who experience auditory hallucinations, such as hearing voices. SPECT studies have also shown changes in blood flow during hallucinations, reinforcing that these symptoms are connected to real, measurable brain activity. Seeing the biological underpinnings associated with the disorder can help reduce stigma and unnecessary shame surrounding the condition for both patients and their families.
The recent study found differences in fifteen brain network components when researchers compared healthy controls to people with schizophrenia. The most significant disruptions involved networks tied to cognitive control, the default mode network, auditory processing, and deeper subcortical brain regions.
Specifically, the study found abnormal communication between:
In simple terms, the researchers examined how different parts of the brain communicate with each other while the brain is at rest. In people with schizophrenia, many of these networks showed weaker coordination and reduced connectivity. This was especially pronounced in areas of hearing, attention, self-awareness, and internal thought processing.
The study also identified disruptions in:
Taken together, the findings suggest that the brain’s major communication systems were not working together properly in the schizophrenia group. Importantly, these SPECT findings closely mirrored patterns previously identified in fMRI studies, further validating the results and strengthening the biological understanding of schizophrenia.
Brain networks are groups of regions that work together. The brain does not operate in one spot at a time; it runs through coordinated systems that are connected and communicating. When network communication breaks down, symptoms can appear.
In schizophrenia, this network disruption can be associated with symptoms such as hallucinations, disorganized thinking, poor attention, social withdrawal, and cognitive problems. As outlined in the symptoms listed above, schizophrenia can involve positive and negative symptoms, as well as cognitive impairment.
This study is particularly valuable because SPECT-enabled network analysis can better capture a picture of the brain’s dysfunction. Older, region-by-region approaches to brain analysis may miss these patterns. Understanding the patterns is critical to developing effective treatment.
Why are these key networks relevant? The cognitive control network helps with focus, planning, and self-monitoring. When this network is not working well, thinking can feel scattered or slower. This connects with common schizophrenia-related cognitive difficulties.
The study found altered co-variation involving cognitive control connections in the resting brain, as well as cognitive control-default mode relationships in rest-task comparisons. This means that the brain at rest and during tasks—and how they correspond to each other—was not behaving as expected.
The brain’s default mode network is usually active during internal thought. But in schizophrenia, default mode disruption has been seen for years in fMRI research. This recent study’s results fits within prior schizophrenia and fMRI network findings.
This study confirms that what had often been noted through fMRI research may now be more visible by using a SPECT-based approach. And obtaining more information through SPECT can contribute to more accurate schizophrenia diagnosis and treatment.
Until now, fMRI has dominated research on brain networks and how different regions communicate with each other. These studies have played a major role in identifying the widespread “disconnectivity” patterns often seen in schizophrenia.
SPECT imaging measures cerebral blood flow, also called perfusion, which reflects how active different parts of the brain are. It does this using a safe radioactive tracer called technetium that allows clinicians to visualize patterns of brain activity.
What makes this study especially important is that it shows SPECT may now be able to do more than identify overactive or underactive brain regions. Researchers demonstrated that advanced network-analysis methods, previously used mostly in fMRI research, can also be applied to SPECT scans to examine how large-scale brain systems communicate with each other.
This is a major step forward because fMRI has traditionally been the primary tool for studying brain network dysfunction in schizophrenia, but it is used mainly in research settings. SPECT, on the other hand, is already widely used in clinical practice to evaluate brain function and blood flow.
By combining advanced network analysis with SPECT imaging, researchers may now be able to study brain communication patterns in more practical, real-world clinical settings. In schizophrenia, this could help clinicians better understand how major brain systems work together, or fail to work together, behind symptoms such as hallucinations, disorganized thinking, and cognitive impairment.
Can a brain scan show schizophrenia? In light of these recent findings, SPECT may become a useful complement to existing imaging research and clinical assessment, but not a replacement for clinical judgment. The study calls SPECT a useful complement to existing fMRI research in finding possible biomarkers for schizophrenia.
Scans can show the underlying physical reality behind a client’s lived experience, illustrating how brain patterns can be associated with different symptoms.
For example, network problems may help explain disorganized thinking; the new study reports its associations with disjointed thoughts. Meanwhile, some patterns were linked to hearing voices.
Schizophrenia appears differently among different individuals, which complicates diagnosis and treatment. But this study points to the ways in which different network disruptions may create different symptom mixes and levels of cognitive difficulty.
Earlier SPECT studies typically examined brain activity one region at a time, focusing mainly on blood flow changes in specific areas of the brain. Researchers often analyzed these scans using voxel-by-voxel mapping, a method that breaks the brain down into thousands of tiny 3-D units to measure activity levels.
This new study took a much broader approach. Instead of looking at isolated brain regions, researchers examined how entire brain networks communicate and work together across the whole brain. That is an important advancement because schizophrenia is increasingly understood as a disorder involving disrupted brain communication, not just problems in one single area.
Another major difference is the use of an automated analysis system called spatially constrained Independent Component Analysis (scICA). In simple terms, this approach uses established brain network templates to help identify patterns more consistently across patients and studies, while still preserving important individual differences. This type of automation may improve reliability and make future schizophrenia research easier to compare and replicate.
This study does not mean a brain scan alone diagnoses schizophrenia. Nor does it prove that network problems are fully “fixable,” even though they are better seen through SPECT.
However, it does suggest that better visibility could support better personalization during diagnosis and treatment. The study frames this line of work as potentially helpful for precision psychiatry and more precise clinical diagnosis.
This enables those who are facing schizophrenia, such as clinicians, patients, and their loved ones, to have more hope than ever before. Seeing the brain more clearly can help both patients and clinicians move away from guesswork or trial-and-error treatment plans.
Amen Clinics does psychiatry differently by looking at the brain. Brain SPECT imaging, employed for more than 35 years at Amen Clinics on patients of all ages, adds functional information to a client’s overall mental health picture.
While diagnosis doesn’t happen with scans alone, personalized care starts with better information. At Amen Clinics, we practice precision medicine by using brain SPECT imaging as part of our comprehensive evaluation to understand what’s really happening in your brain. Conventional psychiatry usually makes diagnoses based on symptoms and cognitive testing alone.
Schizophrenia is not simply a collection of symptoms. It is a complex brain disorder involving disruptions in how major brain systems communicate and work together.
Fortunately, this new SPECT research suggests those disruptions may now be more visible and measurable than ever before.
Using advanced automated analysis, researchers identified widespread abnormalities in brain networks involved in cognitive control, internal thought processing, hearing, emotion, and deeper brain regulation. These findings closely mirror years of fMRI research, but now they may be observable through a brain imaging tool already used in real-world clinical settings.
This matters because better visibility into brain function can lead to more precise, personalized care. As brain-network science continues to evolve, studies like this move psychiatry closer to a future where schizophrenia is understood less by labels and symptoms alone, and more by the underlying brain patterns driving them.
There is still no single accepted diagnostic biomarker or scan that uniquely identifies the disorder. However, additional information provided through cutting-edge tools like SPECT, used in evaluations for decades at Amen Clinics, can reveal the brain patterns associated with common schizophrenia symptoms. These insights can be helpful in rendering more accurate diagnoses.
The study found fifteen significantly different components and altered connectivity involving cognitive control, auditory, default mode, and subcortical networks. Many components showed reduced connectivity in patients with schizophrenia. These insights may be helpful in attaining accurate diagnosis and developing effective treatment plans.
The default mode network is a brain network involved in internal thought and self-referential processing. Prior fMRI studies and this newer SPECT study suggest that it can be disrupted in schizophrenia.
While fMRI has been widely used for brain-network research, SPECT measures perfusion (blood flow), which shows brain activity. This study used fMRI-derived prior findings to estimate the networks shown through SPECT data.
The study does not prove that. However, it suggests these disruptions may now be more visible in SPECT analyses. The ability to obtain this information may support more personalized evaluation of schizophrenia, as well as effective treatment plans and future research.
Schizophrenia affective disorders and other mental health conditions can’t wait. At Amen Clinics, we practice precision medicine—using brain SPECT imaging and comprehensive evaluations to understand what’s really happening in your brain, not just your symptoms.
Our whole-body approach to holistic psychiatry combines cutting-edge neuroscience with natural ways to treat mental health conditions, including targeted nutrition, supplements, lifestyle strategies, therapy, and medications (when necessary). Every treatment plan is personalized to address the root causes of your struggles and support the health of your brain, body, and mind.
Don’t settle for guesswork. You deserve answers—and a plan built specifically for you. Speak with a Brain Health Advisor today at 888-288-9834 or visit our contact page to get started.
About the Reviewer
Dr. Steven Storage is a child, adolescent, and adult psychiatrist at Amen Clinics Los Angeles Metro Area. He earned his medical degree from the UCLA School of Medicine, completed his general psychiatry residency at Stanford Hospital & Clinics, and finished his child/adolescent psychiatry fellowship at the University of Southern California, where he served as Chief Fellow. Dr. Storage is board certified in both adult psychiatry and child/adolescent psychiatry and serves as Adjunct Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at USC. His clinical expertise includes ADHD, autism spectrum disorders, anxiety, depression, bipolar disorders, OCD, PTSD, traumatic brain injury, and psychiatric symptoms in medically complex patients.
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