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An updated roadmap for brain-mental health associations in the UK Biobank

Li, X.; Khalife, S.; Oestreich, L. K. L.

2026-09-13 neuroscience
10.64898/2026.09.09.750514 bioRxiv
Show abstract

The UK Biobank offers an unprecedented opportunity to examine associations between brain imaging and mental health at scale, but their magnitude and replicability remain unclear. We correlated 17,580 imaging-derived phenotypes across seven MRI modalities with 309 mental health phenotypes in 8,415 participants, split into discovery and validation subsets. Associations were generally small (median |r| = 0.018; top 1% of 0.108), and they replicated poorly: only 9.0% of significant discovery associations were significant in validation. Eating disorders showed the largest effects of any mental disorders but replicated in only 6.0% of cases, whereas substance use showed the highest replication (14.5%). Susceptibility-weighted imaging produced the most replicable imaging associations. Longitudinal changes in brain and mental health measures were weakly related. We provide an interactive dashboard that returns the effect-size and replicability benchmarks for any combination of mental health category and imaging modality, supporting variable selection and study design in UK Biobank research.

Matching journals

The top 5 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

1
Nature Human Behaviour
○ 95 papers in training set
Top 0.1%
18.6%
Similar papers in this journal
2
Human Brain Mapping
○ 329 papers in training set
Top 0.3%
12.0%
Similar papers in this journal
3
Nature Neuroscience
○ 252 papers in training set
Top 0.6%
9.8%
Similar papers in this journal
4
Nature Communications
○ 5641 papers in training set
Top 21%
7.9%
Similar papers in this journal
5
NeuroImage
○ 903 papers in training set
Top 3%
4.9%
Similar papers in this journal
50% of probability mass above
6
eLife
● 5828 papers in training set
Top 34%
3.3%
7
Imaging Neuroscience
● 282 papers in training set
Top 2%
3.2%
8
Molecular Psychiatry
○ 282 papers in training set
Top 2%
2.8%
9
Biological Psychiatry
○ 137 papers in training set
Top 1%
2.7%
10
Translational Psychiatry
○ 260 papers in training set
Top 2%
2.1%
11
Wellcome Open Research
○ 67 papers in training set
Top 0.4%
2.1%
12
The British Journal of Psychiatry
● 23 papers in training set
Top 0.2%
2.1%
13
Psychological Medicine
◐ 88 papers in training set
Top 1%
2.1%
14
PLOS ONE
● 5266 papers in training set
Top 47%
1.7%
15
Scientific Data
○ 209 papers in training set
Top 2%
1.5%
16
Science Advances
● 1243 papers in training set
Top 22%
1.5%
17
Nature Mental Health
○ 21 papers in training set
Top 0.4%
1.4%
18
Scientific Reports
○ 3612 papers in training set
Top 63%
1.1%
19
Nature
○ 645 papers in training set
Top 9%
1.1%
20
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
● 2444 papers in training set
Top 35%
1.1%
21
Communications Biology
○ 993 papers in training set
Top 25%
1.0%
22
BMC Medicine
○ 176 papers in training set
Top 4%
1.0%
23
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
● 72 papers in training set
Top 1%
0.8%
24
Communications Medicine
○ 113 papers in training set
Top 4%
0.8%
25
Cerebral Cortex
◐ 396 papers in training set
Top 5%
0.8%
26
Nature Genetics
○ 286 papers in training set
Top 5%
0.6%
27
Cell Reports
○ 1498 papers in training set
Top 29%
0.6%

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.