Systematic organization of cortical thickness co-alterations in substance use disorders.

COEX 

Substance use disorders are highly comorbid with other neuropsychiatric disorders and share with them widespread structural brain alterations (Eaton, Rodriguez-Seijas, Carragher, & Krueger, 2015; Mackey et al., 2019; Reich-Erkelenz, Schmitt, & Falkai, 2015). Previous work has shown that structural alterations across neuropsychiatric conditions are organized in a systematic fashion, linked to the intrinsic organization of the human connectome (Hettwer et al., 2022). However, to what extent similar coordinated co-alteration effects extend to substance use disorders remains to be established. Here, we investigated substance use co-alteration networks (pathological structural covariance) to elucidate concordant macroscale principles of illness and substance-use effects across the cortex.