This review summarizes the last decade of work by the ENIGMA (Enhancing NeuroImaging Genetics through Meta Analysis) Consortium, a global alliance of over 1400 scientists across 43 countries, studying the human brain in health and disease. Building on large-scale genetic studies that discovered the first robustly replicated genetic loci associated with brain metrics, ENIGMA has diversified into over 50 working groups (WGs), pooling worldwide data and expertise to answer fundamental questions in neuroscience, psychiatry, neurology, and genetics. Most ENIGMA WGs focus on specific psychiatric and neurological conditions, other WGs study normal variation due to sex and gender differences, or development and aging; still other WGs develop methodological pipelines and tools to facilitate harmonized analyses of "big data" (i.e., genetic and epigenetic data, multimodal MRI, and electroencephalography data). These international efforts have yielded the largest neuroimaging studies to date in schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance use disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, attentiondeficit/hyperactivity disorder, autism spectrum disorders, epilepsy, and 22q11.2 deletion syndrome. More recent ENIGMA WGs have formed to study anxiety disorders, suicidal thoughts and behavior, sleep and insomnia, eating disorders, irritability, brain injury, antisocial personality and conduct disorder, and dissociative identity disorder. Here, we summarize the first decade of ENIGMA's activities and ongoing projects, and describe the successes and challenges encountered along the way. We highlight the advantages of collaborative large-scale coordinated data analyses for testing reproducibility and robustness of findings, offering the opportunity to identify brain systems involved in clinical syndromes across diverse samples and associated genetic, environmental, demographic, cognitive, and psychosocial factors.
This review summarizes the last decade of work by the ENIGMA (Enhancing NeuroImaging Genetics through Meta Analysis) Consortium, a global alliance of over 1,400 scientists across 43 countries, studying the human brain in health and disease. Building on large-scale genetic studies that discovered the first robustly replicated genetic loci associated with brain metrics, ENIGMA has diversified into over 50 working groups (WGs), pooling worldwide data and expertise to answer fundamental questions in neuroscience, psychiatry, neurology, and genetics. Most ENIGMA WGs focus on specific psychiatric and neurological conditions, other WGs study normal variation due to sex and gender differences, or development and aging; still other WGs develop methodological pipelines and tools to facilitate harmonized analyses of “big data” (i.e., genetic and epigenetic data, multimodal MRI, and electroencephalography data). These international efforts have yielded the largest neuroimaging studies to date in schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance use disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, autism spectrum disorders, epilepsy, and 22q11.2 deletion syndrome. More recent ENIGMA WGs have formed to study anxiety disorders, suicidal thoughts and behavior, sleep and insomnia, eating disorders, irritability, brain injury, antisocial personality and conduct disorder, and dissociative identity disorder. Here, we summarize the first decade of ENIGMA’s activities and ongoing projects, and describe the successes and challenges encountered along the way. We highlight the advantages of collaborative large-scale coordinated data analyses for testing reproducibility and robustness of findings, offering the opportunity to identify brain systems involved in clinical syndromes across diverse samples and associated genetic, environmental, demographic, cognitive and psychosocial factors.
The human brain is able to flexibly adapt its information processing capacity to meet a variety of cognitive challenges. Recent evidence suggests that this flexibility is reflected in the dynamic reorganization of the functional connectome. The ascending catecholaminergic arousal systems of the brain are a plausible candidate mechanism for driving alterations in network architecture, enabling efficient deployment of cognitive resources when the environment demands them. We tested this hypothesis by analyzing both resting-state and task-based fMRI data following the administration of atomoxetine, a noradrenaline reuptake inhibitor, compared with placebo, in two separate human fMRI studies. Our results demonstrate that the manipulation of central catecholamine levels leads to a reorganization of the functional connectome in a manner that is sensitive to ongoing cognitive demands.
Objective: Patients diagnosed with a psychotic disorder and their first-degree relatives display increased reactivity to stress. Theory predicts that experience of psychosocial stress is associated both with ventromedial prefrontal and mesolimbic dopamine neurotransmission. However, while there is evidence of aberrant striatal dopamine processing in psychotic disorder, the role of the prefrontal cortex remains under-researched. This study aimed at investigating stress-induced in vivo dopamine release in ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) of individuals at familial risk for psychosis. Method: Fourteen healthy first-degree relatives of patients with a diagnosis of psychotic disorder and 10 control subjects underwent a single dynamic positron emission tomography (PET) scanning session after intravenous administration of 183.2 (SD = 7.6) MBq [ 18 F]fallypride. Psychosocial stress was initiated at 100 min postinjection using a computerized mental arithmetic task with social evaluative threat components. PET data were analyzed using the linearized simplified reference region model. Regression analyses were performed to compare the spatial extent of task-related ligand displacement between control subjects and relatives and to find how it related to self-rated experiences of psychosocial stress and psychosis. Results: First-degree relatives displayed hyporeactive dopamine signaling in the vmPFC in response to stress. Increased levels of subjectively rated stress were associated with increased intensity of psychotic experiences. This effect was particularly pronounced in first-degree relatives. Conclusion:Although previous studies have hypothesized a role for prefrontal dopamine dysfunction in psychosis, this study, to our knowledge, is the first in vivo human imaging study showing attenuated (ie, hyporeactive) dopamine stress neuromodulation in vmPFC of individuals at familial risk for psychosis.
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Catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) plays an essential role in degradation of extracellular dopamine in prefrontal regions of the brain. Although a polymorphism in this gene, COMT Val158Met, affects human behavior in response to stress little is known about its effect on dopaminergic activity associated with the human stress response, which may be of interest for stress-related psychiatric disorders such as psychosis. We aimed to investigate the effect of variations in COMT genotype on in vivo measures of stress-induced prefrontal cortex (PFC) dopaminergic processing and subjective stress responses. A combined sample of healthy controls and healthy first-degree relatives of psychosis patients (n = 26) were subjected to an [18F]fallypride Positron Emission Tomography scan. Psychosocial stress during the scan was induced using the Montreal Imaging Stress Task and subjective stress was assessed every 12 minutes. Parametric t-maps, generated using the linear extension of the simplified reference region model, revealed an effect of COMT genotype on the spatial extent of [18F]fallypride displacement. Detected effects of exposure to psychosocial stress were unilateral and remained restricted to the left superior and right inferior frontal gyrus, with Met-hetero- and homozygotes showing less [18F]fallypride displacement than Val-homozygotes. Additionally, Met-hetero- and homozygotes experienced larger subjective stress responses than Val-homozygotes. The direction of the effects remained the same when the data was analyzed separately for controls and first-degree relatives. The human stress response may be mediated in part by COMT-dependent dopaminergic PFC activity, providing speculation for the neurobiology underlying COMT-dependent differences in human behaviour following stress. Implications of these results for stress-related psychopathology and models of dopaminergic functioning are discussed.
Highlights We present Neuroharmony, a harmonization tool for images from unseen scanners. We developed Neuroharmony using a total of 15,026 sMRI images. The tool was able to reduce scanner-related bias from unseen scans. Neuroharmony represents a significant step towards imaging-based clinical tools. Neuroharmony is available at https://github.com/garciadias/Neuroharmony .
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