CANCELLED - Trans-diagnostic psychiatry: the search for neurobiologically-valid phenotypes

To meet Claire Gillan, contact Stefano Palminteri: stefano.palminteri@ens.fr.

Attempts to link brain data to discrete psychiatric diagnostic categories have been met with limited success in case-control studies. Many disorders show similar patterns of dysfunction and within a given diagnostic category, not all patients show the same pattern of dysfunction. This talk concerns an alternative approach to understanding the biological basis of mental health - to study key processes trans-diagnostically, setting aside diagnostic categories. I will make the case for this approach by first describing my own research aimed at characterising the neurocognitive basis of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) using cognitive tests of goal-directed control. Next, I will candidly present the limitations of these findings in the context of heterogeneity and comorbidity in DSM diagnoses. I propose that large-datasets present an opportunity to address these fundamental issues of nosology. To this end, I will present more recent cognitive and clinical data from thousands of subjects, which provide evidence that new, trans-diagnostic, psychiatric symptom dimensions can be defined and validated in this way.