Alterations in resting‐state functional connectivity relate to psychopathology trajectories during emerging adolescence

Abstract Background A general psychopathology “ p ‐factor” captures shared variation across psychiatric disorder categories and is associated with dysfunctions in cognitive control. Alterations in resting‐state functional connectivity (RSFC) of cognitive and attentional networks have been associated concurrently with the p ‐factor in youth samples. However, we do not yet know whether these RSFC alterations prospectively relate to change in the p‐factor over time during the transition to adolescence, when many forms of disorder onset or worsen. Methods We examined whether baseline RSFC was prospectively related to the trajectory of p ‐factor scores over three years in 9344 preadolescents (age 9–10 at baseline) from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Adolescent Brain Cognitive DevelopmentSM (ABCD) study. Using longitudinal multilevel modeling, we tested whether baseline within‐ and between‐network RSFC of the default mode (DMN), frontoparietal (FPN), salience (SN), cingulo‐opercular (CON), and ventral and dorsal attention (VAN and DAN) networks were related to the intercept (between‐person differences) and slope (within‐person rate of change) of p‐factor scores over four ABCD study waves (3‐year timeframe). Results There was a significant nonlinear, quadratic trajectory of p‐factor scores over wave. Lower within‐DMN and within‐DAN connectivity and greater DMN‐DAN, DMN‐CON, and VAN‐CON connectivity were associated with higher between‐person levels of p‐factor scores, which persisted over time. Greater VAN‐DAN and SN‐CON connectivity and lower DMN‐VAN connectivity were prospectively associated with steeper within‐person rates of quadratic change in p‐factor scores over time. Conclusion These novel results identify specific alterations in RSFC within and between core networks involved in self‐referential processing, bottom‐up and town‐down attention, salience, and cognitive control that might contribute to general psychopathology development in early adolescence. Children with aberrant connectivity between the DMN and VAN, SN and CON, and VAN and DAN networks may be vulnerable to increases in general psychopathology during the transition to adolescence.