Abstract<br>Mood and anxiety disorders emerge predominantly in adolescence, yet they are usually identified only once symptoms have consolidated, when intervention can only be reactive. A marker that registers the loss of healthy brain function before symptoms crystallise would allow earlier and more targeted treatment, much as caged canaries once warned miners of danger before it became apparent. Here we report such a marker using a single baseline resting-state functional MRI scan in 150 adolescents in the Human Connectome Project Boston Adolescent Neuroimaging of Depression and Anxiety (HCP BANDA) cohort, allowing us to prospectively predict depression and anxiety symptoms one year later in held-out participants at r = 0.60, substantially above the effect-size ceiling reported for functional connectivity in the same data. The marker is not computed from raw functional connectivity but read out from a whole-brain generative model fitted to each individual’s dynamics, which gives access to interference structure that covariance-based features cannot represent. The regions driving the prediction, including precuneus, ventromedial prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortices, are among those previously implicated in internalising disorders, and the same signature tracks cognitive variation in healthy participants and is mechanistically linked to the efficiency of task-related computation. These findings establish a mechanistically interpretable and prospectively predictive marker of adolescent mental health and define a clear path towards external validation and clinical use." />
A canary in the mind: A single baseline brain scan predicts adolescent depression and anxiety one year later | medRxiv
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A canary in the mind: A single baseline brain scan predicts adolescent depression and anxiety one year later
View ORCID ProfileGustavo Deco, View ORCID ProfileYonatan Sanz Perl, View ORCID ProfileJakub Vohryzek, Elvira Garcia-Guzman, View ORCID ProfileDiego A. Pizzagalli, View ORCID ProfileRuben Laukkonen, Shamil Chandaria, View ORCID ProfileMorten L. Kringelbach
doi: https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.06.08.26355206
Gustavo Deco<br>1Center for Brain and Cognition, Computational Neuroscience Group, Faculty of Medicine and Life Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain<br>2Institució Catalana de la Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA), Barcelona, Spain<br>3International Centre for Flourishing, Universities of Oxford (UK), Aarhus (Denmark) and Pompeu Fabra (Spain)
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Yonatan Sanz Perl<br>1Center for Brain and Cognition, Computational Neuroscience Group, Faculty of Medicine and Life Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain<br>3International Centre for Flourishing, Universities of Oxford (UK), Aarhus (Denmark) and Pompeu Fabra (Spain)<br>4Department of Engineering, Universidad de San Andrés, Buenos Aires 1644, Argentina
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Jakub Vohryzek<br>1Center for Brain and Cognition, Computational Neuroscience Group, Faculty of Medicine and Life Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain<br>3International Centre for Flourishing, Universities of Oxford (UK), Aarhus (Denmark) and Pompeu Fabra (Spain)
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Elvira Garcia-Guzman<br>1Center for Brain and Cognition, Computational Neuroscience Group, Faculty of Medicine and Life Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain<br>3International Centre for Flourishing, Universities of Oxford (UK), Aarhus (Denmark) and Pompeu Fabra (Spain)
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Diego A. Pizzagalli<br>5Noel Drury, M.D. Institute for Translational Depression Discoveries, University of California, Irvine, CA, United States<br>6Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior, Department of Neurobiology and Behavior & Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of California, Irvine, CA, United States
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Ruben Laukkonen<br>3International Centre for Flourishing, Universities of Oxford (UK), Aarhus (Denmark) and Pompeu Fabra (Spain)<br>7Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing, Linacre College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK<br>8Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
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Shamil Chandaria<br>3International Centre for Flourishing, Universities of Oxford (UK), Aarhus (Denmark) and Pompeu Fabra (Spain)<br>7Centre for Eudaimonia and...