Increases in impulsivity and negative affect (e.g., neuroticism) are common during adolescence and are both associated with risk for alcohol-use initiation and other risk behaviors.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNat Commun
August 2025
The study of cortical geometry and connectivity is prevalent in human brain research. However, these two aspects of brain structure are usually examined separately, leaving the essential connections between the brain's folding patterns and white matter connectivity unexplored. In this study, we aim to elucidate the fundamental links between cortical geometry and white matter tract connectivity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFChronic pain is a leading cause of disability, yet its underlying susceptibility traits remain unclear. Disorders like chronic pain may stem from extreme neural types, or archetypes, optimized for specific cognitive strategies and reflected in patterns of resting-state networks. Here, we examined a sample from the general population ( = 892) and three clinical samples with subacute back pain ( = 76), chronic back pain ( = 30), and treatment-resistant depression ( = 24).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSubstance use disorder (SUD) stands as a critical public health concern, contributing to substantial morbidity, mortality and societal costs. The effects of SUD on structural brain changes have been well documented. However, the neural mechanisms underlying SUD and the spatial-temporal volumetric changes associated with SUD remained underexplored.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn task functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), collinearity between task regressors in time series models may impact power. When collinearity is identified after data collection, researchers often modify the model in an effort to reduce collinearity. However, some model adjustments are suboptimal and may introduce bias into parameter estimates.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFResilience to developing emotional disorders is critical for adolescent mental health, especially following childhood trauma. Yet, brain markers of resilience remain poorly understood. By analyzing brain responses to angry faces in a large-scale longitudinal adolescent cohort (IMAGEN), we identified two functional networks located in the orbitofrontal and occipital regions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: In adolescence, caffeinated beverage consumption is negatively associated with cognitive functioning. The default mode network and dorsal attention network are anticorrelated brain systems that are essentially implicated in attention. Despite the importance of the anticorrelation of default mode network - dorsal attention network on cognitive functioning, no studies have examined the association between this anticorrelation and recent caffeine consumption among youths.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted various aspects of daily life, leading to increased psychological symptoms and changes in alcohol use, yet little is known about their specific interactions, particularly early stages during the pandemic. We examined the relationship between psychological symptoms and alcohol-related behaviors associated with COVID-19, and determined whether associations shifted already early during the pandemic and whether changes in psychological symptoms from the pre- to during COVID-19 impacted changes in alcohol consumption.
Methods: Participants were young adults from a longitudinal cohort (N=435, age: 22-25) from two time points.
Importance: Psychiatric diagnoses are not defined by neurobiological measures hindering the development of therapies targeting mechanisms underlying mental illness. Research confined to diagnostic boundaries yields heterogeneous biological results, whereas transdiagnostic studies often investigate individual symptoms in isolation.
Objective: To develop a framework that groups clinical symptoms compatible with ICD-10 and DSM-5 according to their covariation and shared brain mechanisms.
Substance use disorder (SUD) stands as a critical public health concern, contributing to substantial morbidity, mortality and societal costs. The effects of SUD on structural brain changes have been well documented. However, the neural mechanisms underlying SUD and the spatial-temporal volumetric changes associated with SUD remained underexplored.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe excitation-inhibition ratio is a key functional property of cortical microcircuits which changes throughout an individual's lifespan. Adolescence is considered a critical period for maturation of excitation-inhibition ratio. This has primarily been observed in animal studies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBiol Psychiatry Cogn Neurosci Neuroimaging
May 2025
Background: Copy number variants (CNVs) may increase the risk for neurodevelopmental conditions. The neurobiological mechanisms that link these high-risk genetic variants to clinical phenotypes are largely unknown. An important question is whether brain abnormalities in individuals who carry CNVs are associated with their degree of penetrance.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFImportance: Psychiatric comorbidity is the norm. Identifying transdiagnostic risk factors will inform our understanding of developmental pathways and early intervention targets.
Objective: We recently reported that many psychiatric outcomes are predicted by a three-factor model composed of adolescent externalizing (EXT) behaviors, early life adversity, and dopamine autoreceptor availability.
The study of cortical geometry and connectivity is prevalent in research on the human brain. However, these two aspects of brain structure are usually examined separately, leaving the essential connections between the brain's folding patterns and white matter connectivity unexplored. In this study, we aimed to elucidate fundamental links between cortical geometry and white matter tract connectivity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBiol Psychiatry
February 2025
Background: Cannabis use is common, particularly during emerging adulthood when brain development is ongoing, and its use is associated with harmful outcomes for a subset of people. An improved understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying risk for problem-level use is critical to facilitate the development of more effective prevention and treatment approaches.
Methods: In the current study, we applied a whole-brain, data-driven, machine learning approach to identify neural features predictive of problem-level cannabis use in a nonclinical sample of college students (n = 191, 58% female) based on reward task functional connectivity data.
Laboratory studies show brain maturation involves synaptic pruning and cognitive development. Human studies suggest links between early cognitive performance and later mental health, but inconsistencies remain. It is unclear if specific brain regions mediate this relationship, and the molecular underpinnings are not well understood.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMounting evidence suggests hierarchical psychopathology factors underlying psychiatric comorbidity. However, the exact neurobiological characterizations of these multilevel factors remain elusive. In this study, leveraging the brain-behavior predictive framework with a 10-year longitudinal imaging-genetic cohort (IMAGEN, ages 14, 19 and 23, = 1,750), we constructed two neural factors underlying externalizing and internalizing symptoms, which were reproducible across six clinical and population-based datasets (ABCD, STRATIFY/ESTRA, ABIDE II, ADHD-200 and XiNan, from age 10 to age 36, = 3,765).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis editorial focuses on the issue of data misuse that is increasingly evidenced in social media as well as some premiere scientific journals. This issue is of critical importance to open science projects in general, and ABCD in particular, given the broad array of biological, behavioural and environmental information collected on this American sample of 12,000 youth and parents. ABCD data are already widely used with over 1,200 publications and twice as many citations per year as expected (relative citation index based on year, field and journal).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPersonal Disord
January 2025
The evidence supporting the presence of individual brain structure correlates of the externalizing spectrum (EXT) is sparse and mixed. To date, large-sample studies of brain-EXT relations have mainly found null to very small effects by focusing exclusively on either EXT-related personality traits (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnhealthy eating, a risk factor for eating disorders (EDs) and obesity, often coexists with emotional and behavioral problems; however, the underlying neurobiological mechanisms are poorly understood. Analyzing data from the longitudinal IMAGEN adolescent cohort, we investigated associations between eating behaviors, genetic predispositions for high body mass index (BMI) using polygenic scores (PGSs), and trajectories (ages 14-23 years) of ED-related psychopathology and brain maturation. Clustering analyses at age 23 years ( = 996) identified 3 eating groups: restrictive, emotional/uncontrolled and healthy eaters.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNat Commun
January 2025
Brain glymphatic activity, as indicated by diffusion-tensor imaging analysis along the perivascular space (ALPS) index, is involved in developmental neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases, but its genetic architecture is poorly understood. Here, we identified 17 unique genome-wide significant loci and 161 candidate genes linked to the ALPS-indexes in a discovery sample of 31,021 individuals from the UK Biobank. Seven loci were replicated in two independent datasets.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground And Aim: Cannabis use disorder (CUD) is strongly influenced by genetic factors; however the mechanisms underpinning this association are not well understood. This study investigated whether a polygenic risk score (PRS) based on a genome-wide association study for CUD in adults predicts cannabis use in adolescents and whether the association can be explained by inter-individual variation in structural properties of brain white matter or risk-taking behaviors.
Design And Setting: Longitudinal and cross-sectional analyses using data from the IMAGEN cohort, a European longitudinal study integrating genetic, neuroimaging and behavioral measures.
JAMA Netw Open
December 2024
Importance: The extent to which neuroanatomical variability associated with early substance involvement, which is associated with subsequent risk for substance use disorder development, reflects preexisting risk and/or consequences of substance exposure remains poorly understood.
Objective: To examine neuroanatomical features associated with early substance use initiation and to what extent associations may reflect preexisting vulnerability.
Design, Setting, And Participants: Cohort study using data from baseline through 3-year follow-up assessments of the ongoing longitudinal Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study.