The ENIGMA Bipolar Medications and Clinical Phenotypes Project: Progress and Future Directions

As the ENIGMA Bipolar Disorder Working Group (ENIGMA-BD; enigma.ini.usc...) enters its second decade of collaboration, we are making a concerted effort to study the relationship between the brain, pharmacotherapy, and clinical and demographic factors in bipolar disorder (BD). Building off our foundational ENIGMA-BD studies, we aim to conduct the largest-ever analysis of standardized, MRI-derived brain metrics, psychotropic medications, and modulating factors. In this symposium, leaders from the project will highlight recent findings, challenges, and new collaborative directions for large-scale neuroimaging studies to better understand how treatments for BD affect brain structure and function. Topics and recent findings to be covered include logistics of large-scale, international studies, standardization of heterogeneous clinical, imaging, and genetics datasets, and development of predictive models that generalize to diverse patient populations. This next generation of ENIGMA-BD studies includes the Medications and Clinical Phenotypes Project, linking multimodal brain metrics to an individuals’ drug regimens (mono- vs various polytherapies), duration of therapy, and daily dosage. In assessing treatment effects, we discuss alternative approaches to modeling medication based on neurobiological/pharmacological profiles, compared to traditional, indication-based treatment descriptors. We also discuss the utility of machine learning techniques to build drug classification models that predict and optimize patient treatment based on structural and functional brain data.
Presenters: Christopher RK Ching, Sinead King, Joaquim Radua
Presentation date: August 2022
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