Childhood maltreatment is a transdiagnostic risk factor, whose distributed neural correlates are most timely and urgently assessed in young adults in the earliest stages of emerging mental disorders. Here, we applied a data-driven multivariate approach to identify distributed brain structural signatures associated with childhood maltreatment, with a particular focus on limbic regions, and to examine their relevance for later functional outcomes. In a transdiagnostic sample of 251 individuals (mean age 24.9 ± 4.3, 51.8% male) with early affective or anxiety syndromes, we used a multivariate sparse partial least squares algorithm to investigate multi-layered associations between grey-matter volume and the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire. We identified signatures linking age-dependent physical abuse and minimization/denial to widespread cortical thinning ( ρ =0.424, p =.007; R 2 = 18%), as well as female-specific emotional abuse to smaller left amygdala nuclei ( ρ =0.566, p =.014; R 2 = 32% shared variance). In females, emotional abuse predicted poorer functioning at 1- ( β =-0.45, p <.001) and 2-year ( β =-0.48, p <.001) follow-up, while smaller amygdala nuclei predicted better outcomes at 2 years ( β =0.26, p =.04), although sensitive to including baseline functioning ( β =0.17, p =.071). Support-vector machine (SVM) analyses further showed that females with higher trauma-related loadings and larger left amygdala nuclei could be identified using clinical features, although only in the extreme tertile split ( BAC =69.2%, p =.038, AUC =0.62, 95%- CI= 0.40–0.84). These findings suggest that trauma-reactive amygdala alterations may reflect heterogeneous sex-specific adaptation trajectories. This highlights the potential of age-, sex-, and trauma type-sensitive assessment at the earliest point of care, and proposes that early identification of such neurobiological signatures can inform more individualised approaches to treatment and recovery.
Huth et al. (Tue,) studied this question.