City Research Online

Abstract

Cortical brain morphology in early-onset psychosis (EOP; age of onset <19 years) is poorly understood, partly due to recruitment constraints linked to its low incidence. We pooled T1-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data from 387 adolescents with EOP (mean age=16.1 ± 1.5; 49.6% female) and 338 healthy controls (CTR; mean age=15.8 ± 1.9, 54.4% female) from nine research sites worldwide. Using harmonized processing protocols, we extracted cortical brain metrics from 34 bilateral regions. Univariate regression analyses revealed widespread lower bilateral cortical thickness (left/right hemisphere: d = −0.36/−0.31), surface area (left/right: d = −0.42/−0.41), cortical volume (left/right: d = −0.58/−0.56), and Local Gyrification Index (LGI; left/right: d = −0.39/−0.52) in EOP relative to CTR. Diagnostic subgroup analyses showed broader and more pronounced case-control differences in early-onset schizophrenia for area, volume, and LGI. We found no associations with antipsychotic medication use, illness duration, age of onset, or positive symptoms. Negative symptoms were related to smaller left lingual volume (partial r = −0.21; pFDR = 0.014) and antidepressant users had smaller area (d = −0.43; pFDR = 0.034) and volume (d = −0.50; pFDR = 0.003) of the right rostral anterior cingulate compared to non-users. Cortical thickness alterations in EOP showed a similar pattern to those observed in prior studies on adults with schizophrenia (SCZ; r = 0.62) and bipolar disorders (BD; r = 0.61). However, surface area alterations were overall 1.5 times greater for EOP than adult SCZ and 4.6 times greater than adult BD. In the largest study of its kind, we observed a widespread pattern of cortical alterations in adolescents with psychotic disorders, highlighting the potential impact of aberrant neurodevelopment on cortical morphology in this clinical group.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Publisher Keywords:	Diseases, Neuroscience
Subjects:	R Medicine > RC Internal medicine > RC0321 Neuroscience. Biological psychiatry. Neuropsychiatry
Departments:	School of Health & Medical Sciences School of Health & Medical Sciences > Department of Psychology & Neuroscience
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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