Transdiagnostic inflammatory subgroups among psychiatric disorders and their relevance to role functioning: a nested case-control study of the ALSPAC cohort

• Published in: Translational psychiatry 2022-09, Vol.12 (1), p.377-377, Article 377
• Main Authors: Byrne, Jonah F., Healy, Colm, Mongan, David, Susai, Subash Raj, Zammit, Stan, Fӧcking, Melanie, Cannon, Mary, Cotter, David R.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 13/21; 631/378; 692/53; 692/699/476/1414; 692/699/476/1799; Adult; Behavioral Sciences; Biological Psychology; Case-Control Studies; Clinical trials; Cohort Studies; Humans; Medicine; Medicine & Public Health; Mental disorders; Mental Disorders - diagnosis; Neurosciences; Pharmacotherapy; Psychiatry; Psychosis; Psychotic Disorders - diagnosis; Receptors, Urokinase Plasminogen Activator; Young Adult
• ISSN: 2158-3188; 2158-3188
• DOI: 10.1038/s41398-022-02142-2

Individuals with psychotic disorders and depressive disorder exhibit altered concentrations of peripheral inflammatory markers. It has been suggested that clinical trials of anti-inflammatory therapies for psychiatric disorders should stratify patients by their inflammatory profile. Hence, we investigated whether different subgroups of individuals exist across psychiatric disorders, based on their inflammatory biomarker signatures. We measured the plasma concentrations of 17 inflammatory markers and receptors in 380 participants with psychotic disorder, depressive disorder or generalised anxiety disorder and 399 controls without psychiatric symptoms from the ALSPAC cohort at age 24. We employed a semi-supervised clustering algorithm, which discriminates multiple clusters of psychiatric disorder cases from controls. The best fit was for a two-cluster model of participants with psychiatric disorders (Adjusted Rand Index (ARI) = 0.52 ± 0.01) based on the inflammatory markers. Permutation analysis indicated the stability of the clustering solution performed better than chance (ARI = 0.43 ± 0.11; p