A Transdiagnostic Network Analysis of Childhood Trauma and Psychopathology

Psychiatric comorbidities suggest that symptoms overlap across different diagnoses; the transdiagnostic network approach is valuable for studying psychopathology. Childhood trauma is a common transdiagnostic risk factor for psychiatric disorders, but the complex relationship between childhood trauma and psychopathology has seldom been investigated using a large cross-sectional transdiagnostic sample.

This study recruited 869 patients with different diagnoses, including 418 schizophrenia, 215 bipolar disorder, and 236 major depressive disorder. Participants completed psychiatric interviews and self-report questionnaires. We constructed dimension- and item-level Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator-based (LASSO) networks to explore the relationship between childhood trauma, psychopathology, and duration of illness. Moreover, we constructed directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) to tentatively clarify the potential directions of associations among these variables. Network Comparison Tests (NCTs) were conducted for different diagnostic groups and gender-stratified groups.

The transdiagnostic LASSO networks showed that different types of childhood trauma exerted distinct impacts on various psychopathological dimensions. Emotional abuse was linked to depressive symptoms, physical abuse to excited symptoms, sexual abuse to positive and disorganized symptoms, emotional neglect to depressive symptoms and motivation and pleasure (MAP) deficits factor of negative symptoms, and physical neglect to MAP factor. The DAG findings generally concurred with the LASSO network. The NCT showed comparable networks.

Our findings suggest that childhood trauma is significantly associated with the development of psychopathology across different diagnostic groups. The affective pathway model suggests that early identification and tailored interventions would be needed for people with a history of childhood trauma.