Citation

Auerbach RP, Chase HW, Brent DA. Am. J. Psychiatry 2021; 178(4): 285-287.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2021, American Psychiatric Association)

DOI

10.1176/appi.ajp.2020.21010022

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

In this issue of the Journal, Vidal-Ribas and colleagues (1) highlight many of the challenges in identifying biological markers that confer risk for suicidal behaviors in preadolescent youths. Lifetime suicidal thoughts and behaviors were assessed in a large sample (N=7,994) of children ages 9-10 years recruited through the Adolescent Brain Cognition Development (ABCD) project. Suicidal thoughts and behaviors were most closely associated with child psychopathology, family conflict, and parental psychopathology. The strongest neural correlate was an association between suicidal thoughts and behaviors and decreased thickness of the superior temporal gyrus. Psychosocial and neuroimaging findings only modestly discriminated between those with and without lifetime suicidal thoughts and behaviors. This study is timely, as the rate of suicidal thoughts and behaviors among preadolescents is increasing rapidly (2), most notably among females, as well as Black youths, for reasons that are poorly understood. Despite recent efforts, no definitive neural correlates of suicidal thoughts and behaviors have been identified (3).

Although the superior temporal gyrus is not a usual suspect in neural markers related to suicide risk, this study, as the authors note, is not the first to identify an association between structural integrity of this region and suicidal thoughts and behaviors (4). Alterations in resting-state functional connectivity have also been observed in a nearby region (Figure 1) (5). The authors' stringent, unbiased approach greatly diminishes the likelihood that this finding is a false positive, while also ensuring that all regions of the brain received adequate attention. A conventional neurofunctional interpretation of the region does not lend itself to extant theories of suicide, as the region is mostly associated with language. There is, however, a growing body of functional and structural literature that also links the region's function to social cognition (6, 7). To provide a more comprehensive overview of the region's functional role, we performed a decoding analysis using the BrainMap database implemented in Mango software...

Language: en

Keywords

Neuroimaging; Suicide and Self-Harm