
Vanessa CropleyUniversity of Melbourne | MSD · Department of Psychiatry
Vanessa Cropley
PhD
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145
Publications
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Introduction
Skills and Expertise
Publications
Publications (145)
The structure and function of the brain and cardiovascular system change over the lifespan. In this study, we aim to establish the extent to which age-related changes in these two vital organs are linked. Utilizing normative models and data from the UK Biobank, we estimate biological ages for the brain and heart for 2904 middle-aged and older healt...
Background: Understanding resilience mechanisms is important for advancing early intervention strategies, yet research on the neurobiology of resilience in adolescents is limited. The present study examined the brain structural and resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) correlates of resilience to internalizing and externalizing symptoms in a...
Importance
Short sleep duration over a prolonged period in childhood could have a detrimental impact on long-term mental health, including the development of psychosis. Further, potential underlying mechanisms of these associations remain unknown.
Objective
To examine the association between persistent shorter nighttime sleep duration throughout c...
OBJECTIVE: Disruptions of axonal connectivity are thought to be a core pathophysiological feature of psychotic illness, but whether they are present early in the illness, prior to antipsychotic exposure, and whether they can predict clinical outcome remains unknown.
METHODS: We acquired diffusion-weighted MRI to map axonal connectivity between each...
Importance
Psychotic illness is associated with anatomically distributed gray matter reductions that can worsen with illness progression, but the mechanisms underlying the specific spatial patterning of these changes is unknown.
Objective
To test the hypothesis that brain network architecture constrains cross-sectional and longitudinal gray matter...
Research examining the neurobiological mechanisms of resilience has grown rapidly over the past decade. However, there is vast heterogeneity in research study design, methods, and in how resilience is operationalized, making it difficult to gauge what we currently know about resilience biomarkers. This preregistered systematic review aimed to revie...
The neighborhoods children grow up in can influence how their brains develop—but we do not yet know exactly how this happens. In a sample of 7,500 children aged 9–10 years, we found that the quality of neighborhoods, which can be measured in various ways including access to parks and libraries, was associated with differences in the communication b...
Background
Anorexia nervosa (AN) is a potentially fatal psychiatric condition, associated with structural brain changes such as gray matter volume loss. The pathophysiological mechanisms for these changes are not yet fully understood. Iron is a crucial element in the development and function of the brain. Considering the systemic alterations in iro...
Childhood adversity increases the risk of developing psychosis, but the biological mechanisms involved are unknown. Disaggregating early adverse experiences into core dimensions of deprivation and threat may help to elucidate these mechanisms. We therefore systematically searched the literature investigating associations between deprivation and thr...
Importance:
Physical health and chronic medical comorbidities are underestimated, inadequately treated, and often overlooked in psychiatry. A multiorgan, systemwide characterization of brain and body health in neuropsychiatric disorders may enable systematic evaluation of brain-body health status in patients and potentially identify new therapeuti...
Both psychotic illness and subclinical psychosis-like experiences (PLEs) have been associated with cortico-striatal dysfunction. This work has largely relied on a discrete parcellation of the striatum into distinct functional areas, but recent evidence suggests that the striatum comprises multiple overlapping and smoothly varying gradients (i.e., m...
Biological aging of human organ systems reflects the interplay of age, chronic disease, lifestyle and genetic risk. Using longitudinal brain imaging and physiological phenotypes from the UK Biobank, we establish normative models of biological age for three brain and seven body systems. Here we find that an organ’s biological age selectively influen...
Importance:
Sleep problems and psychopathology symptoms are highly comorbid and bidirectionally correlated across childhood and adolescence. Whether these associations are specific to discrete profiles of sleep problems and specific internalizing and externalizing phenomena is currently unclear.
Objective:
To characterize individual changes in p...
Research examining the neurobiological mechanisms of resilience has grown rapidly over the past decade. However, there is vast heterogeneity in research study design, methods, and in how resilience is operationalized, making it difficult to gauge what we currently know about resilience biomarkers. This preregistered systematic review aimed to revie...
Background
Morning–evening preference is defined as an individual's preference for a morning‐ or evening‐oriented rhythm. Across adolescence, a preference for eveningness becomes more predominant. Although eveningness is cross‐sectionally associated with internalizing and externalizing psychopathology, few studies have examined developmental change...
Biological aging of human organ systems reflects the interplay of age, chronic disease, lifestyle and genetic risk. Using longitudinal organ imaging and physiological phenotypes from the UK Biobank, we establish normative models of biological age for 7 body (cardiovascular, pulmonary, musculoskeletal, immune, renal, hepatic and metabolic) and 3 bra...
Despite a growing body of research, there is yet to be a cohesive synthesis of studies examining differences in brain morphology according to patterns of cognitive function among both schizophrenia-spectrum disorder (SSD) and bipolar disorder (BD) individuals. We aimed to provide a systematic overview of the morphological differences—inclusive of g...
Dysfunction of fronto-striato-thalamic (FST) circuits is thought to contribute to dopaminergic dysfunction and symptom onset in psychosis, but it remains unclear whether this dysfunction is driven by aberrant bottom-up subcortical signaling or impaired top-down cortical regulation.
We used spectral dynamic causal modelling of resting-state function...
Background: Different regions of the brain's grey matter are connected by a complex structural network of white matter fibres which are responsible for the propagation of action potentials and the transport of trophic and other molecules. In neurodegenerative disease, these connections constrain the way in which grey matter volume loss progresses....
> Impaired valuation during decision-making is a hallmark of depression, manifesting as dysfunctional reward sensitivity and valuation. > People living with depression exhibit an inability of make decisions based on internal value estimations, while exhibiting deficits in executive function and future thinking. > Three systems are thought to be inv...
> Drug valuation is influenced by both internal states (satiety, withdrawal) and external factors (incentive salience of cues). > Drug value encoded by Valuation (VS; medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate cortices, amygdala, nucleus accumbens) and Executive Control Systems (ECS; lateral prefrontal, posterior parietal and middle cingulate cortic...
Neighborhood disadvantage has consistently been linked to alterations in brain structure; however, positive environmental (e.g., positive parenting) and psychological factors (e.g., temperament) may buffer these effects. We aimed to investigate associations between neighborhood disadvantage and deviations from typical neurodevelopmental trajectorie...
Value is the currency of choice in the brain, quantifying the motivational qualities of an object, behaviour or outcome. Delay discounting devalues delayed rewards in favour of immediate rewards thereby impacting choice. Reward valuation arises from competitive interaction between the valuation and control systems to modulate delay discounting rate...
Importance
Altered functional connectivity (FC) is a common finding in resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) studies of people with psychosis, yet how FC disturbances evolve in the early stages of illness, and how antipsychotic treatment influences these disturbances, remains unknown.
Objective
To investigate longitudinal F...
The nature of the relationship between cognition and brain morphology in schizophrenia-spectrum disorders (SSD) and bipolar disorder (BD) is uncertain. This review aimed to address this, by providing a comprehensive systematic investigation of links between several cognitive domains and brain volume, cortical thickness, and cortical surface area in...
While the biological substrates of brain and behavioural changes in persons with schizophrenia remain unclear, increasing evidence implicates that inflammation is involved. In schizophrenia, including first-episode psychosis and anti-psychotic naïve patients, there are numerous reports of increased peripheral inflammation, cognitive deficits and ne...
Poly-drug consumption contributes to fatal overdose in more than half of all poly-drug users. Analyzing decision-making networks may give insight into the motivations behind poly-drug use. We correlated average functional connectivity of the valuation system (VS), executive control system (ECS) and valuation-control complex (VCC) in a large populat...
Background: Altered functional connectivity (FC) is a common finding in resting-state functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (rs-fMRI) studies of people with psychosis, yet how FC disturbances evolve in the early stages of illness, and how antipsychotics may influence the temporal evolution of these disturbances, remains unclear. Here, we scanned fi...
Deficits in brain morphology are one of the most widely replicated neuropathological features in schizophrenia-spectrum disorder (SSD), although their biological underpinnings remain unclear. Despite the existence of hypotheses by which peripheral inflammation may impact brain structure, few studies have examined this relationship in SSD. This stud...
Dysfunction of fronto-striato-thalamic (FST) circuits is thought to contribute to dopaminergic dysfunction and symptom onset in psychosis, but it remains unclear whether this dysfunction is driven by aberrant bottom-up subcortical signaling or impaired top-down cortical regulation. Here, we used spectral dynamic causal modelling (DCM) of resting-st...
Objective
Neighborhood disadvantage has consistently been associated with mental health and cognitive function, in addition to alterations in brain function and connectivity. However, positive environmental influences may buffer these effects. The aim of the present study was to examine the association between neighborhood disadvantage and resting-...
Changes in brain volume are a common finding in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) studies of people with psychosis and numerous longitudinal studies suggest that volume deficits progress with illness duration. However, a major unresolved question concerns whether these changes are driven by the underlying illness or represent iatrogenic effects of a...
Value is the currency of choice in the brain 1 , quantifying motivational qualities of an object, behaviour or outcome. Valuation arises from competitive interaction between the valuation and control systems 2,3. The valuation ststem (orbitofrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, amygdala and nucleus accumbens) encodes neural representations of...
Background
Cigarette smoking is associated with worse cognition and decreased cortical volume and thickness in healthy cohorts. Chronic cigarette smoking is prevalent in schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD), but the effects of smoking status on the brain and cognition in SSD are not clear. This study aimed to understand whether cognitive performa...
Connectomes are typically mapped at low resolution based on a specific brain parcellation atlas. Here, we investigate high-resolution connectomes independent of any atlas, propose new methodologies to facilitate their mapping and demonstrate their utility in predicting behavior and identifying individuals. Using structural, functional and diffusion...
The process of valuation assists in determining if an object or course of action is rewarding. Delay discounting is the observed decay of a rewards' subjective value over time. Encoding the subjective value of rewards across a spectrum has been attributed to brain regions belonging to the valuation and executive control systems. The valuation syste...
The process of valuation assists in determining if an object or course of action is rewarding. Delay discounting is the observed decay of a rewards' subjective value over time. Encoding the subjective value of rewards across a spectrum has been attributed to brain regions belonging to the valuation and executive control systems. The valuation syste...
Poly-drug consumption is a dangerous, yet complex model of substance use that contributes to many cases of imprisonment and fatal overdose. Despite the growing number of studies looking at this phenomenon, there remains a lack of neuroimaging data elucidating the neural markers of poly-drug use. In particular, the valuation system, tasked with weig...
Background
Characterisation of brain morphological features common to cognitively similar individuals with bipolar disorder (BD) and schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD) may be key to understanding their shared neurobiological deficits. In the current study we examined whether three previously characterised cross-diagnostic cognitive subgroups di...
Background
This study aims to investigate whether dimensional constructs of psychopathology relate to variation in patterns of brain development, and to determine whether these constructs share common neurodevelopmental profiles.
Methods
Psychiatric symptom ratings from 9312 youths (8-21 years) from the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort were...
Background
This study aims to investigate whether dimensional constructs of psychopathology relate to advanced, attenuated or normal patterns of brain development, and to determine whether these constructs share common neurodevelopmental profiles.
Methods
Psychiatric symptom ratings from 9312 youths (8-21 years) were parsed into 7 independent dime...
In a machine learning setting, this study aims to compare the prognostic utility of connectomic, brain structural, and clinical/demographic predictors of individual change in symptom severity in individuals with schizophrenia. Symptom severity at baseline and 1‐year follow‐up was assessed in 30 individuals with a schizophrenia‐spectrum disorder usi...
Background
Psychiatric symptoms in childhood and adolescence have been associated with both delayed and accelerated patterns of grey matter development. This suggests that deviation in brain structure from a normative range of variation for a given age might be important in the emergence of psychopathology. Distinct from chronological age, brain ag...
Background
Neuroimaging studies have found dysconnectivity of frontostriatal circuits across a broad spectrum of psychotic symptoms. However, it is unknown whether dysconnectivity within frontostriatal circuits originates from disrupted bottom-up or top-down control signaling within these systems. Here, we used dynamic causal modelling (DCM) to exa...
Background
The neurodevelopmental hypothesis is the most widely regarded framework for understanding the development of schizophrenia. One of the most commonly cited pieces of evidence for this theory is the presence of neurological soft signs (NSS) in individuals prior to the onset of psychosis. Increased NSS is also reported in unaffected individ...
A common limitation of neuroimaging studies is their small sample sizes. To overcome this hurdle, the Enhancing Neuro Imaging Genetics through Meta-Analysis (ENIGMA) Consortium combines neuroimaging data from many institutions worldwide. However, this introduces heterogeneity due to different scanning devices and sequences. ENIGMA projects commonly...
Impaired olfactory identification has been reported as a first sign of schizophrenia during the earliest stages of illness, including before illness onset. The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between volumes of these regions (amygdala, hippocampus, gyrus rectus and orbitofrontal cortex) and olfactory ability in three groups of par...
Objective:
To test the hypothesis that neuroinflammation is a key process in adult Niemann-Pick type C (NPC) disease, we undertook PET scanning utilizing a ligand binding activated microglia on 9 patients and 9 age- and sex-matched controls.
Method:
We scanned all participants with the PET radioligand 11C-(R)-PK-11195 and undertook structural MR...
Psychotic disorders are associated with reductions in brain volume, but the timing and causes of these reductions remain unclear. In particular, the effects of antipsychotic medication and illness have been difficult to disentangle due to a lack of prospective, longitudinal, randomized placebo-controlled designs. We conducted a triple-blind randomi...
Iron has been found to play an important role in neurodegeneration. Quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) is a relatively new – and the most accurate - MRI technique available for assessment of iron deposition in the brain. There is a rapidly growing number of studies using QSM to investigate brain iron distribution in neurodegenerative disease...
Background:
Cognitive heterogeneity in schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD) and bipolar disorder (BD) has been explored using clustering analyses. However, the resulting subgroups have not been cognitively validated beyond measures used as clustering variables themselves. We compared the emergent cross-diagnostic subgroups of SSD and BD patients...
Background
The heterogeneity of schizophrenia has defied efforts to derive reproducible and definitive anatomical maps of structural brain changes associated with the disorder. We aimed to map deviations from normative ranges of brain structure for individual patients and evaluate whether the loci of individual deviations recapitulated group-averag...
Childhood adversity, such as physical, sexual, and verbal abuse, as well as neglect and family conflict, is a risk factor for schizophrenia. Such adversity can lead to disruptions of cognitive function during development, undermining intellectual capabilities and academic achievement. Schizophrenia is a neurodevelopmental disorder that is associate...
Background
In schizophrenia, relative stability in the magnitude of cognitive deficits across age and illness duration is inconsistent with the evidence of accelerated deterioration in brain regions known to support these functions. These discrepant brain–cognition outcomes may be explained by variability in cognitive reserve (CR), which in neurolo...
Objective: Cortical thickness reductions in schizophrenia are irregularly distributed across multiple loci. The authors hypothesized that cortical connectivity networks would explain
the distribution of cortical thickness reductions across the cortex, and, specifically, that cortico-cortical connectivity between loci with these reductions would be...
Background
In schizophrenia, relative stability in the magnitude of fluid cognitive deficits across age and illness duration is inconsistent with evidence of accelerated deterioration in brain regions known to support these functions. These discrepant brain-cognition outcomes may be explained by variability in cognitive reserve (CR), which in neuro...
Background
Although nosologically distinct, there is overlap in the disease presentation of individuals with schizophrenia (Sz) and bipolar disorder (BD). Both disorders are characterized by abnormalities in cognitive performance, and in brain volume, cortical thickness and surface area. It is possible that these abnormalities are related, however...
Background
Previous studies indicate that visuospatial associative memory ability deteriorates over the course of psychotic illness, with substantial impairments observed in individuals with chronic schizophrenia. However, the neural underpinnings of poor performance on this task in schizophrenia have not previously been investigated. While previou...
Background
Memory impairment is a consistent finding in the schizophrenia literature, and it is possible that deficits are the result of disrupted connectivity between key memory-related brain regions – namely, the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex. However, while previous studies have identified relationships between memory performance and hip...
Background
Although cognitive impairment is a recognized feature of schizophrenia (SZ) and bipolar disorder (BD), there is increasing evidence to suggest substantial patient-to-patient variation in cognitive ability that may reflect differences in underlying neurobiology. An expanding body of work has focused on probing this hypothesis by examining...
Individuals with schizophrenia who are homozygous at the c.267C > A (rs2067477) single nucleotide polymorphism within the muscarinic M1 receptor gene have been reported to perform less well on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST). We investigated if rs2067477 genotype variation influenced WCST performance and non-executive cognition cross-diagnos...
Dysregulation of the ubiquitin proteasome system (UPS) has been linked to schizophrenia but it is not clear if this dysregulation is detectable in both brain and blood. We examined free mono-ubiquitin, ubiquitinated proteins, catalytic ubiquitination, and proteasome activities in frozen postmortem OFC tissue from 76 (38 schizophrenia, 38 control) m...
Background:
Psychotic symptoms are proposed to lie on a continuum, ranging from isolated psychosis-like experiences (PLEs) in nonclinical populations to frank disorder. Here, we investigated the neurobiological correlates of this continuum by examining whether functional connectivity of dorsal corticostriatal circuitry, which is disrupted in psych...
Background
Evidence from genome-wide association, microarray, and protein studies have indicated dysregulation of genes and proteins within the Ubiquitin Proteasome Pathway (UPP) in the blood and brain of individuals with schizophrenia. However, it is not clear which components of the UPP, if any, are dysregulated in both blood and brain.
Methods...
Background
While previous studies have identified relationships between hippocampal volumes and memory performance in schizophrenia, these relationships are not apparent in healthy individuals. Further, few studies have examined the role of hippocampal subfields in illness-related memory deficits, and no study has examined potential differences acr...
Background
Psychotic symptoms are proposed lie on a continuum, ranging from isolated psychosis-like experiences (PLEs) in non-clinical populations to frank disorder. Here, we investigate neurobiological correlates of this symptomatologic continuum by examining whether functional connectivity of dorsal corticostriatal circuitry, which is disrupted i...