Associations Between Resting State Functional Connectivity and Trajectories of General Psychopathology in Emerging Adolescents

Abstract

Background: The general psychopathology “p-factor” captures shared variance across psychiatric symptoms and is associated with alterations in resting state functional connectivity (RSFC). Specifically, aberrant connectivity within and between networks responsible for higher-order cognition and attention has been concurrently related to higher levels of p-factor scores in youth. It remains unclear whether and how RSFC prospectively relates to future psychopathology during early adolescence, a developmental period during which many forms of disorders onset and worsen. Methods: Data from 9,344 preadolescents from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study were analyzed to examine the relationship between baseline RSFC and trajectories of general psychopathology in early adolescence. I used longitudinal multilevel modeling to determine whether altered connectivity of the default mode (DMN), frontoparietal (FPN), salience (SN), ventral and dorsal attention (VAN and DAN), and cingulo-opercular (CON) networks were associated with between-person differences and within-person rates of change of p-factor scores over three years. Results: Findings indicate that reduced connectivity within-DMN and DAN, and reduced connectivity between DMN-DAN, DMN-CON, and VAN-CON were associated with higher levels of p-factors scores at baseline, and at the one-year, two-year, and three-year follow-ups. VAN-DAN and SN-CON hyperconnectivity and DMN-VAN hypoconnectivity were prospectively associated with steeper within-person quadratic rates of change in p-factor scores over time. Conclusions: Results suggest that altered connectivity between networks responsible for self-referential processing, filtering salient information, attention processing, and cognitive control may be a vulnerability for increased transdiagnostic psychopathology, exacerbated by significant developmental changes associated with emerging adolescence.