In the current study, PCA was applied to bilateral regional CT from multiple datasets with various sample characteristics ranging in age from 9 to 82 years. The resulting PC1s were highly correlated across the datasets, suggesting that the pattern of regional CT captured by PC1 is reliable and present across different development stages. This is consistent with previous findings demonstrating a reproducible pattern of PC1 derived from averaged CT between left and right hemispheres across large-scale datasets [25]. The present analyses correlating PC1 with spatial patterns in multiple psychiatric disorders, normative maturation and aging, and a common set of transcriptional profiles points toward an underlying pattern of brain structure shared across psychiatric diseases which may be a novel marker of pediatric concern and opens the possibility that the common molecular architecture of this brain structural pattern could be a new potential target for intervention with broad impact. Also, the present findings reveal the utility of re-examining large extant datasets to detect reproducible low-dimensional patterns which may have important implications for psychiatric diseases.
