ADHD and Cortical Thickness: A Predictive Model
Psychiatric disorders have been drastically increasing in prevalence over the past 20 years in youth populations, which has come to the forefront even further as a result of the recent COVID-19 pandemic. One of the most prevalent psychiatric disorders within the adolescent population is attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). ADHD is linked to a variety of neurocognitive deficits which include poor working memory and a struggle to reduce undesirable behaviors, leading to academic and behavioral problems, especially in the adolescent population (Alderson et al., 2013). There is no cure for ADHD and concurrently not much is currently understood about potential risk factors for ADHD as well as its biological basis. Difficulty arises in ADHD research as it suffers from weak etiological signals and clinical prediction. ADHD displays very complex heterogeneity as the disorder can range to a great extent in severity. ADHD illustrates the ‘heterogeneity problem’: different causal mechanisms may relate to the same disorder, and multiple outcomes of interest can occur within one individual (Feczko et. al 2019). The relationship between brain-wide structural features and trends in ADHD symptomology has not been well documented in previous literature and provides importance in developing potential childhood ADHD screening evaluations by examination of the involved structural features. As such, this project aimed to leverage open-access datasets to develop and test a model to analyze the relationship between cortical thickness and ADHD utilizing the polyneuro risk score framework that determines an association between cortical thickness and ADHD and quantifies a numerical value to determine the impact of specific brain regions on ADHD symptomology. After the model was developed using the ADHD dataset, it was then tested on the clinically enriched Healthy Brain Network dataset to ascertain if there was a statistically significant relationship between cortical thickness across the brain and ADHD symptomology.