Brain structure and function link to variation in biobehavioral dimensions across the psychopathological continuum
- Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre, Netherlands
- Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands
Abstract
In line with the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC), we set out to investigate the brain basis of psychopathology within a transdiagnostic, dimensional framework. We performed an integrative structural-functional linked independent component analysis, to study the relationship between brain measures and a broad set of biobehavioral measures in a sample (n = 295) with both mentally healthy participants and patients with diverse non-psychotic psychiatric disorders (i.e. mood, anxiety, addiction, and neurodevelopmental disorders). To get a more complete understanding of the underlying brain mechanisms, we used gray and white matter measures for brain structure and both resting-state and stress scans for brain function. The results emphasize the importance of the executive control network (ECN) during the functional scans, for the understanding of transdiagnostic symptom dimensions. The connectivity between the ECN and the frontoparietal network in the aftermath of stress, was correlated with symptom dimensions across both the cognitive and negative valence domains, and also with various other health related biological and behavioral measures. Finally, we identified a multimodal component that was specifically associated with the diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The involvement of the default mode network, precentral gyrus and thalamus across the different modalities of this component, may reflect the broad functional domains that may be affected in ASD, like theory of mind, motor problems and sensitivity to sensory stimuli respectively. Taken together, the findings from our extentensive, exploratory analyses emphasize the importance of a dimensional and more integrative approach for getting a better understanding of the brain basis of psychopathology.
Data availability
All data analysed in this study is stored in the institutional repository of the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior, and is available on request in line with the institutional ethics guidelines (https://data.donders.ru.nl/). Relevant data generated by the analyses we performed are included in the manuscript and supporting files. The linked ICA decomposition was performed using the Linked ICA toolbox, which was made available earlier by Llera and colleagues (2019) (https://github.com/allera/Llera_elife_2019_1/tree/master/matlab_flica_toolbox).
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Funding
No external funding was received for this work.
Ethics
Human subjects: The MIND-Set study has been approved by the Ethical Review Board of the Radboudumc and all participants signed informed consent before participation.
Copyright
© 2023, van Oort et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Brain structure and function link to variation in biobehavioral dimensions across the psychopathological continuum
eLife 12:e85006.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.85006
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