Frontiers in psychiatry
Cognitive and affective networks in patients referred for cognitive screening: latent profiles, bridge nodes, and exploratory directional structures
By Wang Y, Xie Y, Yuan L and 4 others.
Abstract
Background
Lower cognitive performance and anxiety and depression frequently co-occur in patients referred for cognitive screening, but how the two domains are connected, and whether this differs across patient subgroups, is unclear. Prior network studies used abbreviated cognitive tools, self-report affective measures, and undirected models.
Methods
In this cross-sectional study of 548 patients referred for cognitive screening at a Chinese general hospital, 16 network nodes were derived from the seven Montreal Cognitive Assessment domains, the two Hamilton Anxiety Rating Scale factors, and the seven factors of the 24-item Hamilton Depression Rating Scale. Gaussian graphical models with bridge expected influence were estimated for the overall sample and for each profile identified by latent profile analysis. Bayesian directed acyclic graphs with bootstrap resampling explored the direction of cross-domain associations in the overall sample and within each profile. The network comparison test compared profiles.