Evidence for similar structural brain anomalies in youth and adult attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: a machine learning analysis

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-review

Contributors

  • ENIGMA ADHD Working Group - (Author)
  • SUNY Upstate Medical University
  • Syracuse University
  • University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  • Universidade de São Paulo
  • August Pi i Sunyer Biomedical Research Institute
  • Brighton and Sussex Medical School
  • Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust
  • CIBER - Center for Biomedical Research Network
  • University of Barcelona
  • Hospital Clinic of Barcelona
  • RWTH Aachen University
  • Jülich Research Centre
  • Utrecht University
  • King's College London (KCL)
  • Heidelberg University 
  • National Medical Research Center for Children's Health
  • University of Würzburg
  • Monash University
  • Massachusetts General Hospital
  • Harvard University
  • Radboud University Nijmegen
  • D'Or Institute for Research and Education
  • University of Zurich
  • New York University
  • New York State Office of Mental Health
  • University of Pennsylvania
  • University of Reading
  • University of Melbourne
  • University of Dundee
  • University Hospital Tübingen
  • PFH – Private University of Applied Sciences
  • University of California at San Diego
  • Oregon Health and Science University
  • Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center
  • University of Cincinnati
  • University of Tübingen
  • Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg
  • Trinity College Dublin
  • German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE)
  • University of Bergen
  • Haukeland universitets­sjukehus
  • University of Groningen

Abstract

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) affects 5% of children world-wide. Of these, two-thirds continue to have impairing symptoms of ADHD into adulthood. Although a large literature implicates structural brain differences of the disorder, it is not clear if adults with ADHD have similar neuroanatomical differences as those seen in children with recent reports from the large ENIGMA-ADHD consortium finding structural differences for children but not for adults. This paper uses deep learning neural network classification models to determine if there are neuroanatomical changes in the brains of children with ADHD that are also observed for adult ADHD, and vice versa. We found that structural MRI data can significantly separate ADHD from control participants for both children and adults. Consistent with the prior reports from ENIGMA-ADHD, prediction performance and effect sizes were better for the child than the adult samples. The model trained on adult samples significantly predicted ADHD in the child sample, suggesting that our model learned anatomical features that are common to ADHD in childhood and adulthood. These results support the continuity of ADHD’s brain differences from childhood to adulthood. In addition, our work demonstrates a novel use of neural network classification models to test hypotheses about developmental continuity.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Article number82
JournalTranslational psychiatry
Volume11
Issue number1
Publication statusPublished - Jun 2021
Peer-reviewedYes
Externally publishedYes

External IDs

PubMed 33526765
ORCID /0000-0003-2408-2939/work/172086075