Topographical similarity of cortical thickness represents generalized anxiety symptoms in adolescence

Abstract

Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is a common condition characterized by excessive and uncontrollable worry, along with its high comorbidity rates. Despite increasing efforts to identify the neural underpinnings of GAD, neuroimaging research using cortical thickness have yielded largely inconsistent results. To address this, we adopted an inter-subject representational similarity analysis framework to explore a potential nonlinear relationship between vertex-wise cortical thickness and generalized anxiety symptom severity. We utilized a sample of 120 adolescents (13–18 years of age) from the Healthy Brain Network dataset. Here, we found greater topographical resemblance among participants with heightened generalized anxiety symptoms in the left caudal anterior cingulate and pericalcarine cortex. These results were not driven by the effects of age, sex, ADHD diagnosis, and GAD diagnosis. Such associations were not observed when including a group of younger participants (11–12 years of age) for analyses, highlighting the importance of age range selection when considering the link between cortical thickness and anxiety. Our findings reveal a novel cortical thickness topography that represents generalized anxiety in adolescents, which is embedded within the shared geometries between generalized anxiety symptoms and cortical thickness. © 2023 The Authors