Personalized estimates of morphometric similarity in bipolar disorder and schizophrenia

• Type of Material: Article
• Authors: Gaelle E. Doucet, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai; Dongdong Lin, Georgia State University; Yuhui Du, Georgia State University; Zening Fu, Georgia State University; David C. Glahn, Harvard University; Vincent D. Calhoun, Georgia State University; Jessica Turner, Georgia State University; Sophia Frangou, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
• Language: English
• Date: 2020-12-04
• Publisher: NATURE RESEARCH
• Publication Version: Final Published Version
• Copyright Statement: © The Author(s) 2020
• License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
• Final Published Version (URL): http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41537-020-00128-x
• Title of Journal or Parent Work: NPJ SCHIZOPHRENIA
• Volume: 6
• Issue: 1
• Start Page: 39
• End Page: 39
• Grant/Funding Information: Dr. Doucet received support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) (R03AG064001; P20GM130447). Dr. Frangou received support from the NIH (R01MH104284; R01MH113619; R01MH116147; R01 AG050345). Dr. Glahn received support from the NIH (R01 MH078143; R01MH106324). Dr. Calhoun received support from the NIH (P20GM103472, R01MH094524). This work was supported in part through the computational resources and staff expertise provided by Scientific Computing at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
• Keywords: Life Sciences & Biomedicine; BRAIN STRUCTURE; SCALE; Science & Technology; Psychiatry; BIOMARKERS; COGNITIVE SUBGROUPS; HETEROGENEITY; SUBTYPES; MARKERS; DISEASE
• Research Categories: Health Sciences, Medicine and Surgery; Biology, Neuroscience

Abstract

Bipolar disorder and schizophrenia are associated with brain morphometry alterations. This study investigates inter-individual variability in brain structural profiles, both within diagnostic groups and between patients and healthy individuals. Brain morphometric measures from three independent samples of patients with schizophrenia (n = 168), bipolar disorder (n = 122), and healthy individuals (n = 180) were modeled as single vectors to generated individualized profiles of subcortical volumes and regional cortical thickness. These profiles were then used to compute a person-based similarity index (PBSI) for subcortical volumes and for regional cortical thickness, to quantify the within-group similarity of the morphometric profile of each individual to that of the other participants in the same diagnostic group. There was no effect of diagnosis on the PBSI for subcortical volumes. In contrast, compared to healthy individuals, the PBSI for cortical thickness was lower in patients with schizophrenia (effect size = 0.4, p ≤ 0.0002), but not in patients with bipolar disorder. The results were robust and reproducible across samples. We conclude that disease mechanisms for these disorders produce modest inter-individual variations in brain morphometry that should be considered in future studies attempting to cluster patients in subgroups.