Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
New researchIrritability Trajectories, Cortical Thickness, and Clinical Outcomes in a Sample Enriched for Preschool Depression
Section snippets
Participants
Participants were drawn from the prospective longitudinal Preschool Depression Study (PDS; N = 306; present analyses examined 271 with ≥3 annual clinical assessments available as is necessary for growth curve modeling; Table S1, available online, presents demographics by subsample). The PDS has the broad goal of exploring clinical and neural outcomes relating to preschool-onset depression. Details of the study have been published previously.20 Briefly, 3- to 5-year-old children and their
Irritability Trajectory Characteristics
Of the 5 models tested (Table S3, available online), the model of 3 latent classes (Figure 1) showed the lowest Bayesian information criterion, the lowest Akaike information criterion, and the highest entropy, suggesting the best and most parsimonious fit and best classification of individuals. Some children (14.24%) showed high irritability during the preschool period, which remained high across development (“high irritability” class). Many children (53.14%) showed preschool-age irritability
Discussion
This is the first study to relate latent trajectories of irritability symptoms across early development to cortical thickness in a sample of youth enriched for depressive symptoms during the preschool period. We identified 3 latent trajectories classes based on repeated semistructured clinical interviews from preschool age through adolescence. The class with chronically elevated irritability showed poor clinical outcomes, specifically increased rates of depression and other psychopathology and
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2023, Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent PsychiatryCitation Excerpt :Future studies should include more diverse samples, report sociodemographic composition of the study samples, and evaluate and discuss how the sociodemographic sample characteristics affect their findings. Importantly, more research is needed to examine the impact of early life adversity and trauma on the etiology and development of childhood irritability, as youths from marginalized and adverse backgrounds represent one of the most vulnerable groups to develop irritability symptoms and deserve timely intervention.32,61,62 Studies differ in irritability measures.
This work was supported by NIMH grants R01MH66031, R01MH084840, R01MH090786, R01MH098454-S, and R01MH064769-06A1. Work by Drs. Pagliaccio, Pine, and Leibenluft was supported by the Intramural Research Program at the NIMH.
Disclosure: Drs. Pagliaccio, Pine, Barch, Luby, and Leibenluft report no biomedical financial interests or potential conflicts of interest.