Mental disorders found to share a common feature of brain function

Across various psychiatric diagnoses, brain networks reconfigure significantly less between resting state and task performance. This is the conclusion reached by scientists from Rutgers and Yale Universities together with their colleagues — the results of their work have been published in the journal Nature Communications.

The researchers analyzed data from 219 adult participants: 134 individuals had psychiatric diagnoses, while 85 had no corresponding history. The sample included patients with depression, anxiety and bipolar disorders, schizophrenia, ADHD, OCD, and a number of other conditions.

Each participant underwent functional MRI — both at rest and while performing tasks involving cognitive control and emotional processing. Six recordings were obtained for each person. Based on coordinated changes in activity across different brain regions, the scientists assessed the brain's functional connectivity.

It was found that in people with diagnoses, the organization of brain networks changed noticeably less between recordings. The authors describe this phenomenon as a "flattening" of dynamics: the brain maintains a more uniform configuration even when task demands change.

In addition, the scientists compared the scanning data with 110 clinical, behavioral, and cognitive measures. The resulting symptom profiles cut across conventional diagnostic boundaries — people with different diagnoses frequently demonstrated similar combinations of difficulties.

The models were additionally validated on a separately held-out dataset of 43 participants. The results open the way to studying shared mechanisms of mental disorders, but do not yet allow for diagnosis based on MRI. Some diagnostic subgroups turned out to be too small, and the identified relationship between network dynamics and symptoms still requires independent verification.