Sex-Related Brain Differences in ADHD: Using a pattern recognition for meta-analysis framework in psychiatric disorders
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2017-08-01
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en
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Abstract
Currently, biological constructs capable of describing psychiatric disorders in a dimensional way, rather than a categorical one, are in need in clinical psychiatry. Pattern recognition techniques have offered a lot of advances in this direction, but further improvements are required. Issues that hinder progress such as the biological heterogeneity of disorders and scanner confounds need to be addressed effectively.
In the current study, we look into sex-related neuroanatomical differences in ADHD during childhood/adolescence and adulthood. Following a multivariate classification approach, we construct predictive models of biological sex that capture, initially, the normative sex-related diversity found in the controls of a multi-site dataset. Subsequently, we apply our models on patients with ADHD in a meta-analytic fashion and quantify their position on the normative scale obtained in the step before. The association between relative position and symptom severity is eventually estimated.
Our findings provide evidence for a stronger effect of ADHD on female children/adolescents being placed much closer to their neurotypical sex in comparison with their male counterparts. For adults this discrepancy between females and males seems to vanish. A positive association between proximity to neurotypical sex and symptom severity was found for the female children/adolescents and a negative one for the male adults.
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Faculteit der Sociale Wetenschappen