medRxiv [Preprint]. 2026 Jul 6:2026.07.02.26357108. doi: 10.64898/2026.07.02.26357108. ABSTRACT Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is among the most prevalent anxiety disorders, and it has been associated with signs of advanced biological ageing. Despite this, brain age research on anxiety disorders remains limited. This mega-analysis investigated brain ageing in adults with SAD within the ENIGMA-Anxiety Working Group. Structural MRI scans from 576 participants with SAD and 1 355 non-affected healthy controls (HCs) across 26 international samples were included. Brain age was estimated from 77 cortical and subcortical regions using a publicly available ENIGMA brain age model. The brain-predicted age difference (brain-PAD) […]
Monat: Juli 2026
The neuroanatomy of depression: weak but replicable effects in 4021 individuals from three clinical cohorts
Neuropsychopharmacology. 2026 Jul 10. doi: 10.1038/s41386-026-02491-2. Online ahead of print. ABSTRACT The structural neuroanatomy underlying Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) remains elusive and even large-scale neuroimaging studies and meta-analyses produced inconsistent outcomes with marginal effect sizes. Furthermore, the replicability of brain-psychopathology associations is under scrutiny, attributable to inadequately powered sample sizes and inflated effect sizes. The present study aimed to examine the effect sizes, replicability, and generalizability of brain structural alterations in MDD, harnessing the wealth of three large-scale clinical cohorts. We used three independent cohorts totaling n = 4021 deeply characterized participants (aged 15-65 years), encompassing MDD patients […]
Brain Aging in Specific Phobia: An ENIGMA-Anxiety Mega-Analysis
Hum Brain Mapp. 2026 Jul;47(10):e70595. doi: 10.1002/hbm.70595. ABSTRACT Specific phobia (SPH) is a prevalent anxiety disorder and may involve advanced biological aging. However, limited brain age research has been conducted in anxiety disorders. This mega-analysis investigated brain aging in SPH participants within the ENIGMA-Anxiety Working Group. 3D brain structural MRI scans from 17 international samples (600 SPH individuals, of whom 504 formally diagnosed and 96 questionnaire-based cases; 1134 controls; age range: 22-75 years) were processed with FreeSurfer. Brain age was estimated from 77 subcortical and cortical regions with a publicly available ENIGMA brain age model. The brain-predicted age […]