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Transdiagnostic Symptom Burden Shapes Cognition and Brain Structure in Adolescence: A Longitudinal Study
Medrxiv : the Preprint Server for Health Sciences
|July 10, 2026
Summary
A new mental health burden measure in adolescents reveals consistent links between higher burden and lower cognitive performance and reduced brain volumes. These findings highlight a global marker for early psychiatric vulnerability.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Developmental Psychology
- Psychiatry
Background:
- Adolescence is a critical period for neurodevelopment and the emergence of psychiatric symptoms.
- Symptom-specific markers for psychiatric conditions often show inconsistent associations with cognition and brain structure longitudinally.
- Existing approaches struggle with generalizability and longitudinal tracking of psychiatric vulnerability.
Purpose of the Study:
- To develop and validate a transdiagnostic mental-health burden measure integrating multiple symptom domains.
- To examine the cognitive and structural brain correlates of this global mental-health burden in early adolescence longitudinally.
- To assess the long-term stability of mental health differences and brain-behavior associations.
Main Methods:
- Utilized data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study.
- Derived a transdiagnostic mental-health burden measure across multiple symptom domains.
- Conducted longitudinal analyses of cognitive performance (vocabulary, memory, processing speed) and brain structure (whole-brain, cortical, white-matter volumes) over 2 and 4 years.
Main Results:
- Higher mental-health burden was consistently associated with lower cognitive performance and reduced brain volumes at baseline and after 2 years.
- These effects were most pronounced in adolescents with persistent high mental-health burden.
- Mental health differences remained robust after 4 years, though brain-behavior associations weakened, suggesting developmental reorganization.
Conclusions:
- A global mental-health burden measure offers a scalable and developmentally appropriate marker for early psychiatric vulnerability.
- This transdiagnostic approach overcomes the limitations of traditional symptom-specific markers.
- The findings underscore the importance of considering global mental health status in understanding adolescent neurodevelopment and psychiatric risk.
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