Depression and anxiety can be predicted by childhood brain development, new study finds

The speed at which a child’s brain matures can forecast whether they will develop depression or anxiety as a teenager up to four years before symptoms emerge, according to the latest research.

Analysing just under 30,000 brain scans, the study has revealed that mental health conditions may stem from a disrupted developmental timeline.

The findings, published in Nature, challenge long-standing assumptions about how psychiatric disorders develop, suggesting that vulnerability to mental health issues could be set in motion by genetic programming active before birth.

“It makes you think about the timing of brain development, not just the location, when we look at psychiatric symptoms,” said Dr Avram Holmes, a systems neuroscientist at Rutgers University.

During childhood and adolescence, the brain’s outer layer – the cerebral cortex – naturally thins as unused neural connections are pruned to make brain function more efficient.

Tracking children every two years from age nine, researchers at the University of Iowa and Mass General Brigham found that this thinning follows a distinct wave.

Primary sensory regions like the visual cortex begin to mature at around age 13, before frontal areas governing focus, planning, and emotional regulation at around 16.

When researchers linked these brain scans to mental health surveys, a clear predictive pattern emerged: children with a thicker cortex in sensory regions at age nine were significantly more likely to experience anxiety and depression by age 13.

“The question is not 'what does this region do?' It's 'when does this region mature?”" explained study co-author Dr Joshua Roffman, a psychiatrist at Mass General Brigham.

By cross-referencing their scans with brain atlases, the team discovered that regions where cortical thickness predicted future symptoms overlapped with gene networks active in the womb.

This indicates that early genetic development lays the groundwork for adolescent mental health risks, even years later.

Experts suggest that having a thicker cortex late in childhood may reflect delayed brain plasticity, making it harder for children to adapt to their environments.

But because the study relies on population-level trends, scientists emphasise these subtle patterns cannot yet be used in clinics to diagnose individual children.

While the work “provides one of the clearest pictures yet of how the cortex develops from childhood into adolescence,” Dr Holmes stressed it is not yet “sufficient in its own right to predict illness outcomes” for an individual child.