Child and Adolescent Brain Development and Mental Disorders

Mental health problems in children and adolescents have been a significant issue in China. We attempt to connect the mental health problems to individual differences in brain development that synthesizes and reflects genetic and environmental factors. We are closely collaborating with the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Shanghai Mental Health Center, to construct a neuroimaging cohort of children and adolescents with anxiety disorders. Currently, our cohort has more than 200 samples; nearly half are patients with anxiety disorder. In the future, we aim to extend this cohort into a full-spectrum neuroimaging cohort of mental disorders in children and adolescents.

With these data, we found that adolescents (15-17 years) with social anxiety disorder exhibited higher grey matter volume in the orbital frontal gyrus and insula than age- and sex-matched typically developing adolescents. We observed disrupted co-variance between the gray matter volume of the insula, amygdala, and orbital frontal gyrus in the patients. These findings point to a delayed and unsynchronized brain development in adolescents with social anxiety disorder. See Liu, Hu et al., 2020, for details.

We found that adolescents with social anxiety disorder exhibit significantly abnormal asymmetry in thalamus volume. This asymmetry becomes more evident in the relative older group (14-17), supporting brain developmental abnormalities in children and adolescents with SAD. Furthermore, this asymmetry significantly weakens the relationships between parental attachment and the overall anxiety level of adolescents. The findings further reveal the interactions between physiological and chronic stress in children and adolescents with SAD. See Zhang et al., 2020, for details.