Brain scans show that adolescents with more symptoms of certain mental health conditions, autism or ADHD have undergone less pruning than usual of synaptic connections between neurons
By Clare Wilson
24 April 2023
Our brains prune away unwanted connections between neurons as we grow and learn
MEHAU KULYK/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/Alamy
Many disparate conditions, such as depression, phobias and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), may have the same underlying cause: a delay in “pruning”, a process in which unneeded connections between brain cells disappear.
The finding comes from one of the largest brain-scanning studies done in adolescents and has been confirmed in several other data sets, including people of other ages. “We’ve been able to show that these different [conditions] are all related to a single underlying neurobiological factor,” says Barbara Sahakian at the University of Cambridge.
The results lend weight to a controversial recent idea in neuroscience that many disparate conditions share a common cause – a concept known as the p factor.
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Until now, this was mainly based on the fact that many people have more than one such condition or may be diagnosed with different conditions at different times in their lives, as well as DNA studies finding that the same set of gene variants predispose people to multiple conditions.
Now Sahakian and her colleagues are proposing a neurobiological basis for the p factor, which they call the “neuropsychopathological (NP) factor”.