The associations of Positive and Negative Valence Systems, Cognitive Systems and Social Processes on disease severity in anxiety and depressive disorders.
Front Psychiatry 2023;
14:1161097. [PMID:
37398596 PMCID:
PMC10313476 DOI:
10.3389/fpsyt.2023.1161097]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Submit a Manuscript] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/07/2023] [Accepted: 05/19/2023] [Indexed: 07/04/2023] Open
Abstract
Background
Anxiety and depressive disorders share common features of mood dysfunctions. This has stimulated interest in transdiagnostic dimensional research as proposed by the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) approach by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) aiming to improve the understanding of underlying disease mechanisms. The purpose of this study was to investigate the processing of RDoC domains in relation to disease severity in order to identify latent disorder-specific as well as transdiagnostic indicators of disease severity in patients with anxiety and depressive disorders.
Methods
Within the German research network for mental disorders, 895 participants (n = 476 female, n = 602 anxiety disorder, n = 257 depressive disorder) were recruited for the Phenotypic, Diagnostic and Clinical Domain Assessment Network Germany (PD-CAN) and included in this cross-sectional study. We performed incremental regression models to investigate the association of four RDoC domains on disease severity in patients with affective disorders: Positive (PVS) and Negative Valance System (NVS), Cognitive Systems (CS) and Social Processes (SP).
Results
The results confirmed a transdiagnostic relationship for all four domains, as we found significant main effects on disease severity within domain-specific models (PVS: β = -0.35; NVS: β = 0.39; CS: β = -0.12; SP: β = -0.32). We also found three significant interaction effects with main diagnosis showing a disease-specific association.
Limitations
The cross-sectional study design prevents causal conclusions. Further limitations include possible outliers and heteroskedasticity in all regression models which we appropriately controlled for.
Conclusion
Our key results show that symptom burden in anxiety and depressive disorders is associated with latent RDoC indicators in transdiagnostic and disease-specific ways.
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