News

Dec 2025: It was a great ENIGMA summit in Amsterdam, where neurodevelopmental working groups and methods working groups met to share the latest results and tried to find new ways to collaborate. I will share here some of Paul Thompson’s (PI ENIGMA) conclusions of the 2-day meeting:

Today’s ENIGMA Summit compared over 20 brain disorders in tens of thousands of people scanned with MRI, and suggests that:

1. brain disorders that hit very early, before birth (e.g. those due to genomic copy number variants such as genetic deletions) tend to affect cortical surface area, often excessively in primary sensorimotor cortex

2. neurodevelopmental brain disorders that hit after birth but before adolescence tend to reduce cortical surface area more than (i.e. with greater effect sizes than) they reduce cortical thickness but more in a transmodal association cortex pattern than a primary sensorimotor pattern; these can be split into an strong externalizing and a weak internalizing pattern depending on the disorder type [4]

3. brain disorders that hit after puberty tend to affect cortical thickness, more so than regional cortical surface area, with some exceptions, as do adult onset disorders

4. the last category of mainly-thickness-deficit disorders can have their abnormality decomposed into 3 components – (1) a general component common to all disorders (PC1 in Zhipeng Cao’s work [2]), (2) a disorder specific component, and (3) a medication effect

5. focusing on the first two of these, there is a transdiagnostic covariance [1] that spans the set of disorder effects on the cortex and consists of 2 primary axes of disturbance, G1 and G2

6. to some extent, the amount and anatomical distribution of structural brain deviation in a disorder depends on the location and profile of greatest normal age-related brain change that is normally occurring in healthy people when the disorder hits and can look like an exaggerated version of that change, i.e. ‘aging’ 

7.  some of this is set out more formally in the transdiagnostic ENIGMA papers by Meike Hettwer/Sofie Valk on transdiagnostic covariance [1] and brain gradients, and in the linear PCA paper by Zhipeng Cao Hugh Garavan and ENIGMA [2]. For the CNV part see work by Clara Moreau [3], and for the childhood part see work by Sophie Townend and 4 of the ENIGMA neurodevelopmental working groups [unpublished except an abstract]. 

This is not really obvious until you see all the work presented together (as it was today at the ENIGMA Summit).

References:

1. Hettwer et al., Nature Communications, 2022
2. Cao et al., Mol Psychiatry, 2022
3. Moreau et a., Curr Opin Genet Dev 2022
4. Townend et al, https://osf.io/g42u5/

Nov 2024: It was only a short visit of 9 weeks, but it was a great experience having Luca Hargitai, PhD student from the University of Bath in our group. We are sad to say goodbey and will miss her so much but fortunately, we have set up a very exciting new project when she was in Nijmegen, so we will keep on working together.

Nov 2024: The lab-groups of Corina Greven and Martine Hoogman joined forces to together work on a lab handbook for both labs. This was done during a 1,5 day lab retreat at the Holthurnsche Hof in Berg en Dal. It was a great success, and talking about our lab culture, development as a researcher, scientific vision and practicallities mainly for newcomers also brought us closer to one another. To get some fresh air, we put on our rain coats and went outside for a round of ‘klootschieten‘.

November 2024: Exciting news, because at the end of this month, Nijmegen will have a brain museum! And what makes it even more exciting is that members of our group are preparing an exhibition about ADHD.

The brain is your body’s most complex organ. Would you like to discover how your brain helps you think and act? Then this is your chance because on Saturday 30 November (11 am – 5 pm), the doors of the new Brain Museum will officially open at the Latin School in Nijmegen. At the Brain Museum, you can go on an interactive journey of discovery through the world of the brain, behaviour and science! For both young and old, there is plenty to do. Are you curious? Take a look at the website of the Donders Institute here.

November 2024: Geweldig nieuws, want eind deze maand heeft Nijmegen een brein museum! En wat extra leuk is dat onderzoekers uit onze groep een tentoonstelling aan het voorbereiden zijn over ADHD.

Het brein is het meest complexe orgaan van je lichaam. Wil je ontdekken hoe jouw hersenen je helpen denken en doen? Dan is dit je kans. Op zaterdag 30 november (11:00 – 17:00 uur) gaan de deuren van het nieuwe Brein Museum officieel open in de Latijnse School in Nijmegen. In het Brein Museum kun je op een interactieve ontdekkingsreis gaan door de wereld van hersenen, gedrag, en wetenschap! Voor zowel jong als oud is er vanalles te doen. Ben je nieuwsgierig? Neem dan een kijkje op de website van het Donders Instituut.