NATURE MEDICINE: Prediction of mental health risk in adolescents
- Liviu Poenaru
- Apr 8
- 1 min read
Apr 8, 2025
Prospective prediction of mental health risk in adolescence can facilitate early preventive interventions. Here, using psychosocial questionnaires and neuroimaging measures from over 11,000 children in the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development Study, we trained neural network models to stratify general psychopathology risk. The model trained on current symptoms accurately predicted which participants would convert into the highest psychiatric illness risk group in the following year (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve = 0.84). The model trained solely on potential etiologies or disease mechanisms achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.75 without relying on the child’s current symptom burden. Sleep disturbances emerged as the most influential predictor of high-risk status, surpassing adverse childhood experiences and family mental health history. Including neuroimaging measures did not enhance predictive performance. These findings suggest that artificial intelligence models trained on readily available psychosocial questionnaires can effectively predict future psychiatric risk while highlighting potential targets for intervention. This is a promising step toward artificial intelligence-based mental health screening for clinical decision support systems.
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