Keynotes | K&Ts | GACs | Talks | Posters | Search

Poster C in Poster Session C: Wednesday, August 5, 9:30 – 11:15 am, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

A data-driven approach for identifying multi-domain connectivity signatures

Alexa Mousley¹, Yuankai He¹, Maria Vedechkina², Duncan E. Astle¹; ¹University of Cambridge, ²MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit

Presenter: Alexa Mousley

Adversity, cognition, mental health, and genetics are embedded in brain structure, but the way they relate to each other at the neural level remains unclear. Using partial least squares analysis on white matter connectivity from a large pre-adolescent sample (ABCD, N = 7,384), we identified structural ‘connectivity signatures’ related to each domain. These signatures, each comprised of thousands of edges, significantly overlapped with one another except adversity and mental health. Edges uniquely related to adversity were significantly shorter and stronger than those related to mental health. Despite this polarized connectivity pattern, adversity and mental health connectivity signatures do meaningfully converge, but only in architecture shared with cognition and genetics. These results suggest an indirect relationship between the biological embedding of adverse experience and mental health challenges which are mediated by shared cognitive and genetic pathways. This project highlights the importance of multi-domain approaches for uncovering structural brain architecture that may bridge environmental risk and psychopathology.

Topic Area: Development, Individual Differences & Clinical Populations