Mood and anxiety disorders are the leading contributors to mental illness in individuals between the ages of 10 and 24, accounting for over 65% of the disease burden. However, the currently defined diagnostic boundaries of mood disorders (such as major depressive disorders and bipolar disorders) and anxiety disorders are highly permeable, with significant overlap in psychopathology. This clinical overlap is especially pronounced in youth, as symptoms of depression and anxiety often precede the development of distinct syndromal diagnoses.
Despite extensive research, neurobiological studies have yet to identify disorder-specific biomarkers for mood and anxiety disorders. Instead, transdiagnostic features have been identified through neuroimaging and genetic research.
A recent report published in Molecular Psychiatry describes the findings of a research team from the Department of Psychiatry at the University of British Columbia. Using machine learning techniques and data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study, the team investigated the presence of neuroimaging-defined subtypes in a cross-sectional sample of youth with mood and anxiety disorders. In their results, 3 transdiagnostic subtypes were identified that evidenced greater exposure to parental psychopathology, family conflict, and adverse experiences including bullying, compared to the typically developing group. Beyond these similarities, the three subtypes had distinct neuroimaging profiles, including cortical thickness, surface area, and subcortical volume etc, potentially implicating different youth developmental mechanisms.
This study is the first one to uncover the brain structural heterogeneity in juvenile mood and anxiety disorders and indicate marked differences in maturational profiles but lack diagnostic specificity. According to the authors, their results "comprehensively characterize pre-adolescent mood and anxiety disorders, the biopsychosocial context in which they arise, and lay the foundation for the investigation of the longitudinal evolution of the maturational and clinical trajectories of these subtypes in follow-up studies" of this ABCD sample.
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