Researchers looked at whether one brain feature might link different mental health problems. They built a single measure from the summed strength of certain connections in the front of the brain, which they called the NP factor. The main work used young people in the population-based IMAGEN study (1,750 at age 14, 882 of them girls, and about 1,300 of the same group again at age 19). They then checked the pattern in other groups: preadolescents around age 10 to 11, healthy adults aged 22 to 35, and clinical samples that included people with ADHD.
At age 14 this brain measure was tied to acting-out symptoms (r=0.31) and to inward symptoms such as anxiety and low mood (r=0.23), and both links were very unlikely to be chance. The links were weaker at age 19 but did not disappear (externalizing r=0.13, internalizing r=0.051).
People with more than one diagnosis scored higher on the measure than people with no diagnosis, a large gap (Cohen's d=1.22). People with a single diagnosis also scored higher than controls (d=0.70). In a separate ADHD sample, cases scored a bit higher than controls (d=0.30).
The authors note the findings are correlational, so cause is not proven, and the samples may include fewer of the most severe cases.
Source: Chao Xie, Shitong Xiang, Chun Shen, et al.. A shared neural basis underlying psychiatric comorbidity. Nature Medicine (2023). doi:10.1038/s41591-023-02317-4
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