Coordinated cortical thickness alterations across six neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders

• Published in: Nature communications Vol. 13; no. 1; pp. 6851 - 14
• Main Authors: Hettwer, M. D., Larivière, S., Park, B. Y., van den Heuvel, O. A., Schmaal, L., Andreassen, O. A., Ching, C. R. K., Hoogman, M., Buitelaar, J., van Rooij, D., Veltman, D. J., Stein, D. J., Franke, B., van Erp, T. G. M., Jahanshad, N., Thompson, P. M., Thomopoulos, S. I., Bethlehem, R. A. I., Bernhardt, B. C., Eickhoff, S. B., Valk, S. L.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 11.11.2022; Nature Publishing Group; Nature Portfolio
• Subjects: 59; 59/57; 631/378/2649; 692/699/375/366; 692/699/476; Attention; Brain mapping; Cerebellum; Cerebral Cortex - pathology; Cognitive ability; Connectome; Covariance; Disorders; Functionally gradient materials; Humanities and Social Sciences; Humans; Illnesses; Machine learning; Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Manifolds (mathematics); Medical imaging; Mental Disorders; multidisciplinary; Networks; Neurodevelopmental disorders; Neuroimaging; Science; Science (multidisciplinary); Thalamus; Thickness; Transcriptomics
• ISSN: 2041-1723; 2041-1723
• DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-34367-6

Neuropsychiatric disorders are increasingly conceptualized as overlapping spectra sharing multi-level neurobiological alterations. However, whether transdiagnostic cortical alterations covary in a biologically meaningful way is currently unknown. Here, we studied co-alteration networks across six neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders, reflecting pathological structural covariance. In 12,024 patients and 18,969 controls from the ENIGMA consortium, we observed that co-alteration patterns followed normative connectome organization and were anchored to prefrontal and temporal disease epicenters. Manifold learning revealed frontal-to-temporal and sensory/limbic-to-occipitoparietal transdiagnostic gradients, differentiating shared illness effects on cortical thickness along these axes. The principal gradient aligned with a normative cortical thickness covariance gradient and established a transcriptomic link to cortico-cerebello-thalamic circuits. Moreover, transdiagnostic gradients segregated functional networks involved in basic sensory, attentional/perceptual, and domain-general cognitive processes, and distinguished between regional cytoarchitectonic profiles. Together, our findings indicate that shared illness effects occur in a synchronized fashion and along multiple levels of hierarchical cortical organization. Neuropsychiatric disorders may have shared features. Here the authors identified hubs of transdiagnostic co-alteration networks using meta-analytical maps of ENIGMA neuroimaging data for six neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders.