In contrast to previous studies that have investigated normative brain maturation and aging as well as the relevant transcriptional signatures [59–61], our work demonstrated that age-related cortical changes were correlated with the spatial pattern of PC1, and this effect was replicated with large-scale longitudinal and cross-sectional data. Moreover, we further included a range of psychiatric and neurological disorders, which reveals that cortical changes in many psychiatric disorders and normative aging share a widely distributed neuroanatomical pattern defined by the spatial distribution of PC1. This result suggests there is a common latent factor in many mechanistically distinct processes, namely psychopathology-related and aging-related cortical changes, which may explain the previous brain-age findings wherein psychiatric and neurological disorders were characterized by greater gaps between chronological and brain-predicted age [21]. The commonality between neurodevelopment and psychiatric disorders can reflect the shared underlying biological profiles reported in the previous studies [14, 21, 54]. For instance, the pleiotropic loci related to multiple psychiatric disorders have been shown related to neurodevelopment [14].
