Identification and validation of distinct latent neurodevelopmental profiles in the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development study.

Abstract Background Regardless of the precise mechanism, all neurodevelopmental models of risk assume that, at the population level, there exist subgroups of individuals that share similar patterns of neural function and development—and that these subgroups somehow relate to psychiatric risk. However, the existence of multiple neurodevelopmental subgroups at the population level has not been assessed previously. Methods In the current study, cross-validated latent profile analysis was used to test for the presence of empirically derived, brain-based developmental subgroups using fMRI data from 6,758 individuals (49.4% female; mean age=9.94) in the ABCD Wave 1 release. Data were randomly split into training and testing samples. Results Analyses in the training sample (n=3,379) identified a 7-profile solution (entropy=.880), that replicated in the held-out testing data (n=3,379, entropy=.890). Identified subgroups included a ‘moderate’ group (66.8%), high reward (4.3%) and low reward (4.0%) groups, high inhibition (9.8%) and low inhibition (6.7%) groups, and high emotion regulation (4.0%) and low emotion regulation (4.3%) groups. Relative to the moderate group, other subgroups were characterized by more males (χ2=24.10, p=.0005), higher proportions of individuals from lower-income households (χ2=122.17, p Conclusions These data demonstrate the existence of multiple, distinct neurodevelopmental subgroups at the population-level. They indicate that these empirically derived, brain-based developmental profiles relate to differences in clinical features, even at a young age, and prior to the peak period of risk for the development of psychopathology.