Specificity of Brain Volume Alterations in Children with Various Parental Histories of Psychopathology

Background: Multiple forms of parental psychopathology have been associated with differences in child subcortical brain volume. Much of this work has relied on studies of individual forms of parental psychopathology without considering the role of comorbid disorders. Here, we examine the specificity of relationships between multiple forms of parental psychopathology and alterations in child subcortical brain structure. Method: We examined 6581 children from the ABCD study with no history of mental disorders. Hierarchical linear models were used to examine whether neuroanatomical correlates of parental history of depression, anxiety, mania, and alcohol/substance use are disorder-specific or general across different disorders, and whether interactions between parental disorders were associated with offspring brain structure. Results: There were several significant interactions such that the effects of parental histories of depression, anxiety, and substance use problems on the volume of the amygdala and striatal regions were moderated by comorbid parental history of another disorder. Additionally, a parental history of depression was associated with smaller amygdala volume and a parental history of mania was associated with larger amygdala, pallidum, thalamus, and total subcortical volume before and after controlling for histories of other parental disorders. Conclusion: Results suggest that effects of a parental history of various forms of psychopathology on offspring subcortical brain volume are moderated by comorbid history of other disorders, highlighting the importance of assessing multiple forms of psychopathology when examining neurobiological associations. A limitation is that measures of parental psychopathology did not come from gold standard interview assessments and lacked information of timing, duration, and severity.