2023 Articles

Big or Little Data for Magnetic Resonance Imaging Research in Psychiatry?

Talati, Ardesheer; Van Dijk, Milenna T.; Weissman, Myrna M.

To the Editor: In recent years, there has been an impetus for larger magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies of brain function and disease to obtain more robust findings. A recent article by Marek et al. in Nature (1) concluded that brain-wide association studiesstudies “testing associations between individual variability in brain structure and function and cognitive or psychiatric symptoms”—are currently underpowered and that casts of thousands are needed to obtain reproducible results. The study received considerable attention in the scientific community and an article in The New York Times Magazine (2). The implications touched the work of many psychiatric researchers who see MRI as a tool to finally understand brain function and mechanisms of neuropsychiatric disorders. ...