In mental disorders brain loses flexibility

Researchers led by Carrisse Cocuzza and Avram Holmes, an associate professor of psychiatry, studied a large transdiagnostic data set of 219 participants, including individuals with 11 different psychiatric diagnoses. Detailed behavioral, cognitive, and clinical measures were collected for each participant, and magnetic resonance imaging was performed both at rest and during cognitive tasks. This allowed researchers to observe how brain connectivity patterns changed across six different cognitive states.

Based on these data, the experts described how brain networks reconfigure over time, and formed individual “symptom imprints” — personalized profiles combining behavioral and clinical characteristics.

In people with psychiatric conditions, the dynamics of brain networks turned out to be less flexible. Their networks switched worse between different configurations when changing cognitive tasks compared to healthy participants. Such dynamic changes proved useful not only for distinguishing patients from healthy people, but also for distinguishing individual diagnostic groups.

It is especially important that the patterns of brain network dynamics correlated more strongly with individual symptomatic imprints, rather than with traditional diagnostic labels. The dynamic characteristics of brain function more accurately reflect how symptoms manifest themselves in a particular person, rather than simply recording the presence of a diagnosis. According to the authors, this approach supports the transition to more personalized, biologically based mental health models.

Avram Holmes emphasizes that the results indicate that impairments in temporal brain processes may underlie differences in people’s cognitive and behavioral functioning. By demonstrating that network dynamics reflect symptom variability even beyond conventional diagnostic boundaries, the study provides a scientific foundation for more nuanced assessments of mental health.

Future work plans to explore how brain network dynamics change over time and in response to interventions, with the aim of developing more precise and personalized approaches to mental health assessment and support.