New paper in Molecular Psychiatry: white matter in early psychosis
Our new paper in Molecular Psychiatry, “Disentangling white matter correlates of symptom severity and general impairment in early psychosis”, is out.
Using diffusion MRI from 882 participants of the PRONIA study, we found two distinct patterns of white-matter alterations:
- a widespread pattern associated with cognitive and functional impairment, which was also present in depression;
- a more focal pattern associated with psychosis-related symptom severity, which did not generalise to depression.
For precision psychiatry, the question is not only whether brains differ between diagnostic groups, but what those differences represent: disorder-specific processes, general psychopathology, cognition, functioning or treatment. Answering it is a step from brain maps towards clinically meaningful biomarkers.
The work was led by Nora Penzel and Kang Ik Cho together with Ofer Pasternak, in a large collaborative effort of the PRONIA consortium.
Figure: Penzel et al., Molecular Psychiatry 2026, CC BY 4.0.