6. Characterizing brain-body relationships using normative modeling

COEX 

Integrated research into brain and body systems holds substantial clinical potential in addressing multimorbidity and physical illness burden in people with neuropsychiatric disorders. However, different omics and brain imaging data can have substantially different distributions across individuals. This poses challenges in integrating and comparison of data at multiple levels. Normative modeling provides an excellent opportunity to address this challenge because each biomarker is benchmarked against its own distribution of population norms. Individual variation for a given biomarker is thus standardized and comparable across multiple biophysical and physiological domains. In this educational workshop, I will showcase how we can use normative modeling approaches to characterize brain-body relationships. I will first showcase how to establish normative models of biological age for three-brain and seven-body systems. By doing so, I identified a multiorgan aging network to demonstrate how the aging of one organ system selectively and characteristically influences the aging of other brain and body systems. I will then present a multiorgan, system-wide characterization of brain and body health for common neuropsychiatric disorders. I will show that individuals diagnosed with these neuropsychiatric disorders are not only characterized by deviations from normative reference ranges for brain phenotypes but also present considerably poorer physical health across multiple body systems compared to their healthy peers.

Stats:
(Duration: 40min; Presenter: Ye Ella Tian; Format: Interactive Presentation; Programming language, Toolboxes and Libraries: N/A:; Degree of interactivity: 20%)

Relevant papers:
Tian, Ye Ella, et al. ‘Evaluation of Brain-Body Health in Individuals With Common Neuropsychiatric Disorders’. JAMA Psychiatry, Apr. 2023. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2023.0791.