Abstract

Although primary psychiatric disorders (PPDs) and behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) share many of their symptoms, their structural anatomical changes have not been thoroughly studied. We included studies on bvFTD, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and autism spectrum disorder that 1) reported the coordinates of the regional gray matter volumes (GMVs) and 2) used voxel-based morphometry analysis to assess regional GMVs in this magnetic resonance imaging-based meta-analysis. Between patients and control subjects, clusters of coordinate-based changes in the GMVs were compared in separate analyses (n = 24,183), and overlapping brain regions between each PPD and bvFTD were examined. The transdiagnostic brain alterations in bvFTD and PPD consist of GMV alterations in the temporal lobe, amygdala, and insula, as well as the prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortices. Our cross-disorder approach would provide new insights into the relationship between bvFTD and PPD, and our meta-analysis revealed significant anatomic overlap that paves the way for future investigations of shared pathophysiological pathways.