Brain network dynamics reflect psychiatric illness status and transdiagnostic symptom profiles across health and disease.

Abstract

The network organization of the human brain dynamically reconfigures in response to changing environmental demands, an adaptive process that may be disrupted in a symptom-relevant manner across psychiatric illnesses. Here, in a transdiagnostic sample of participants with (n = 134) and without (n = 85) psychiatric diagnoses, functional connectomes from intrinsic (resting-state) and task-evoked fMRI were decomposed to identify constraints on brain network dynamics across six cognitive states. Hierarchical clustering of 110 clinical, behavioral, and cognitive measures identified participant-specific symptom profiles, revealing four core dimensions of functioning: internalizing, externalizing, cognitive, and social/reward. Brain network dynamics were flattened across cognitive states in individuals with psychiatric illness and could be used to accurately separate dimensional symptom profiles more robustly than both case/control status and primary diagnostic grouping. A key role of inhibitory cognitive control and frontoparietal network interactions was uncovered through systematic model comparison. We provide evidence that brain network dynamics can accurately differentiate the extent that psychiatrically-relevant dimensions of functioning are exhibited across health and disease.