Anhedonia as a transdiagnostic symptom across psychological disorders: a network approach

Abstract

Background: Anhedonia is apparent in different mental disorders and is suggested to be related to dysfunctions in the reward system and/or affect regulation. It may hence be a common underlying feature associated with symptom severity of mental disorders.

Methods: We constructed a cross-sectional graphical Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO) network and a relative importance network to estimate the relationships between anhedonia severity and the severity of symptom clusters of major depressive disorder (MDD), anxiety sensitivity (AS), attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in a sample of Dutch adult psychiatric patients (N = 557).

Results: Both these networks revealed anhedonia severity and depression symptom severity as central to the network. Results suggest that anhedonia severity may be predictive of the severity of symptom clusters of MDD, AS, ADHD, and ASD. MDD symptom severity may be predictive of AS and ADHD symptom severity.

Conclusions: The results suggest that anhedonia may serve as a common underlying transdiagnostic psychopathology feature, predictive of the severity of symptom clusters of depression, AS, ADHD, and ASD. Thus, anhedonia may be associated with the high comorbidity between these symptom clusters and disorders. If our results will be replicated in future studies, it is recommended for clinicians to be more vigilant about screening for anhedonia and/or depression severity in individuals diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, ADHD and/or ASD.

Keywords: Anhedonia; RDoC; comorbidity; network approach.

Fig. 1.

Graphical LASSO network. Nodes represent anhedonia severity or severity of symptom clusters of MDD, AS, ADHD, or ASD. All edges represent positive regularized partial correlations. The thickness of an edge reflects the magnitude of the association (the thickest edge representing a value of 0.61).

Fig. 2.

Relative importance network. Nodes represent anhedonia severity or severity of symptom clusters of MDD, AS, ADHD, or ASD. All edges reflect the relative importance of a node as a predictor of another node. Each thickness represents its magnitude. Arrows denote predictive directionality.

Fig. 3.

Centrality plot for the relative importance network depicting standardized measures of nodes’ betweenness, closeness, in-strength and out-strength. Nodes represent anhedonia severity or severity of symptom clusters of MDD, AS, ADHD, or ASD. More positive values indicate stronger associations with other nodes in the network.