scholarly journals Risk of lead exposure, subcortical brain structure, and cognition in a large cohort of 9- to 10-year-old children

PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (10) ◽  
pp. e0258469
Author(s):  
Andrew T. Marshall ◽  
Rob McConnell ◽  
Bruce P. Lanphear ◽  
Wesley K. Thompson ◽  
Megan M. Herting ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Development ◽  
Corpus Callosum ◽  
Cognitive Performance ◽  
Lead Exposure ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Brain Structure ◽  
Cognitive Test ◽  
Subcortical Brain ◽  
Subcortical Brain Structure ◽  
Neighborhood Level

Background Lead, a toxic metal, affects cognitive development at the lowest measurable concentrations found in children, but little is known about its direct impact on brain development. Recently, we reported widespread decreases in cortical surface area and volume with increased risks of lead exposure, primarily in children of low-income families. Methods and findings We examined associations of neighborhood-level risk of lead exposure with cognitive test performance and subcortical brain volumes. We also examined whether subcortical structure mediated associations between lead risk and cognitive performance. Our analyses employed a cross-sectional analysis of baseline data from the observational Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study. The multi-center ABCD Study used school-based enrollment to recruit a demographically diverse cohort of almost 11,900 9- and 10-year-old children from an initial 22 study sites. The analyzed sample included data from 8,524 typically developing child participants and their parents or caregivers. The primary outcomes and measures were subcortical brain structure, cognitive performance using the National Institutes of Health Toolbox, and geocoded risk of lead exposure. Children who lived in neighborhoods with greater risks of environmental lead exposure exhibited smaller volumes of the mid-anterior (partial correlation coefficient [rp] = -0.040), central (rp = -0.038), and mid-posterior corpus callosum (rp = -0.035). Smaller volumes of these three callosal regions were associated with poorer performance on cognitive tests measuring language and processing speed. The association of lead exposure risk with cognitive performance was partially mediated through callosal volume, particularly the mid-posterior corpus callosum. In contrast, neighborhood-level indicators of disadvantage were not associated with smaller volumes of these brain structures. Conclusions Environmental factors related to the risk of lead exposure may be associated with certain aspects of cognitive functioning via diminished subcortical brain structure, including the anterior splenium (i.e., mid-posterior corpus callosum).

scholarly journals Economic, social, and physiological resilience predict brain structure and cognitive performance in 9 - 10-year-old children

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marybel Robledo Gonzalez ◽  
Clare E. Palmer ◽  
Kristina A. Uban ◽  
Terry L. Jernigan ◽  
Wesley K. Thompson ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Performance ◽  
Brain Structure ◽  
Test Performance ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Cognitive Test ◽  
Economic Disadvantage ◽  
Risk And Resilience ◽  
Socioeconomic Context ◽  
Underlying Mechanisms ◽  
Cognitive Test Performance

AbstractWhile children with economic disadvantage are at risk for poorer outcomes in cognitive and brain development, less understood is the contribution of other factors in the broader socioeconomic context that may more closely index the underlying mechanisms influencing risk and resilience. We examined brain structure and cognitive test performance in association with economic disadvantage and 22 measures in the broader socioeconomic context among n = 8,158 demographically diverse 9-10-year-old children from the ABCD Study. Total cortical surface area and total cognition scores increased as a function of income-to-needs, with the steepest differences most apparent among children below and near poverty relative to their wealthier peers. We found three latent factors encompassing distinct relationships among our proximal measures, including social, economic, and physiological well-being, each associated with brain structure and cognitive performance independently of economic advantage. Our findings will inform future studies of risk and resilience in developmental outcomes for children with economic disadvantage.

scholarly journals Polygenic selection underlies evolution of human brain structure and behavioral traits

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evan R. Beiter ◽  
Ekaterina A. Khramtsova ◽  
Celia Van Der Merwe ◽  
Emile R. Chimusa ◽  
Corinne Simonti ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Human Evolution ◽  
Brain Structure ◽  
Complex Traits ◽  
Balancing Selection ◽  
Brain Evolution ◽  
Intracranial Volume ◽  
Nucleotide Polymorphisms ◽  
Subcortical Brain ◽  
Subcortical Brain Structure ◽  
Polygenic Adaptation

AbstractSeemingly paradoxical characteristics of psychiatric disorders, including moderate to high prevalence, reduced fecundity, and high heritability have motivated explanations for the persistence of common risk alleles for severe psychiatric phenotypes throughout human evolution. Proposed mechanisms include balancing selection, drift, and weak polygenic adaptation acting either directly, or indirectly through selection on correlated traits. While many mechanisms have been proposed, few have been empirically tested. Leveraging publicly available data of unprecedented sample size, we studied twenty-five traits (i.e., ten neuropsychiatric disorders, three personality traits, total intracranial volume, seven subcortical brain structure volume traits, and four complex traits without neuropsychiatric associations) for evidence of several different signatures of selection over a range of evolutionary time scales. Consistent with the largely polygenic architecture of neuropsychiatric traits, we found no enrichment of trait-associated single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in regions of the genome that underwent classical selective sweeps (i.e., events which would have driven selected alleles to near fixation). However, we discovered that SNPs associated with some, but not all, behaviors and brain structure volumes are enriched in genomic regions under selection since divergence from Neanderthals ~600,000 years ago, and show further evidence for signatures of ancient and recent polygenic adaptation. Individual subcortical brain structure volumes demonstrate genome-wide evidence in support of a mosaic theory of brain evolution while total intracranial volume and height appear to share evolutionary constraints consistent with concerted evolution. We further characterized the biological processes potentially targeted by selection, through expression Quantitative Trait Locus (eQTL) and Gene Ontology (GO) enrichment analyses and found evidence for the role of regulatory functions among selected SNPs in immune and brain tissues. Taken together, our results suggest that alleles associated with neuropsychiatric, behavioral, and brain volume phenotypes have experienced both ancient and recent polygenic adaptation in human evolution, acting through neurodevelopmental and immune-mediated pathways.

scholarly journals Shared Predisposition in the Association Between Cannabis Use and Subcortical Brain Structure

2015 ◽  
Vol 72 (10) ◽  
pp. 994 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Pagliaccio ◽  
Deanna M. Barch ◽  
Ryan Bogdan ◽  
Phillip K. Wood ◽  
Michael T. Lynskey ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Brain Structure ◽  
Cannabis Use ◽  
Subcortical Brain ◽  
Subcortical Brain Structure

scholarly journals Subcortical brain structure in children with developmental coordination disorder: A T1-weighted volumetric study

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melody N. Grohs ◽  
Catherine Lebel ◽  
Helen L. Carlson ◽  
Brandon T. Craig ◽  
Deborah Dewey
Keyword(s):  
Brain Structure ◽  
Developmental Coordination Disorder ◽  
Neurodevelopmental Disorder ◽  
Preliminary Evidence ◽  
Brain Morphology ◽  
Motor Deficits ◽  
Brain Volumes ◽  
Subcortical Brain ◽  
Subcortical Brain Structure ◽  
Coordination Disorder

AbstractDevelopmental coordination disorder (DCD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder occurring in 5–6% of school-aged children. Converging evidence suggests that dysfunction within cortico-striatal and cortico-cerebellar networks may contribute to motor deficits in DCD, yet limited research has examined the brain morphology of these regions. Using T1-weighted magnetic resonance imaging the current study investigated cortical and subcortical volumes in 37 children with DCD, aged 8 to 12 years, and 48 controls of a similar age. Regional brain volumes of the thalamus, basal ganglia, cerebellum and primary motor and sensory cortices were extracted using the FreeSurfer recon-all pipeline and compared between groups. Reduced volumes within both the left and right pallidum (Left: F = 4.43, p = 0.039; Right: F = 5.24, p = 0.025) were observed in children with DCD; however, these results did not withstand correction for multiple comparisons. These findings provide preliminary evidence of altered subcortical brain structure in DCD. Future studies that examine the morphology of these subcortical regions are highly encouraged in order replicate these findings.

scholarly journals Determining the association between regionalisation of cortical morphology and cognition in 10,145 children

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
C E Palmer ◽  
W Zhao ◽  
R Loughnan ◽  
J Zou ◽  
C C Fan ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Development ◽  
Cognitive Performance ◽  
Brain Structure ◽  
Individual Variability ◽  
Significant Advance ◽  
Cognitive Domains ◽  
Global Brain ◽  
Cortical Morphology ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Cortical Architecture

ABSTRACTIndividuals undergo protracted changes in cortical morphology during childhood and adolescence, coinciding with cognitive development. Studies quantifying the association between brain structure and cognition do not always assess regional cortical morphology relative to global brain measures and typically rely on mass univariate statistics or ROI-based analyses. After controlling for global brain measures, it is possible to detect a residual regionalisation pattern indicating the size or thickness of different regions relative to the total cortical surface area or mean thickness. Individual variability in regionalisation may be important for understanding and predicting between subject variability in cognitive performance. Here we sought to determine whether the relative configuration of cortical architecture across the whole cortex was associated with cognition using a novel multivariate omnibus statistical test (MOSTest) in 10,145 children aged 9-10 years from the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study. MOSTest is better powered to detect associations that are widely distributed across the cortex compared to methods that assume sparse associations. We then quantified the magnitude of the association between vertex-wise cortical morphology and cognitive performance using a linear weighted sum across vertices, based on the estimated vertex-wise effect sizes. We show that the relative pattern of cortical architecture, after removing the effects of global brain measures, predicted unique variance associated with cognition across different imaging modalities and cognitive domains.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENTThis paper demonstrates a significant advance in our understanding of the relationship between cortical morphology and individual variability in cognition. There is increasing evidence that brain-behaviour associations are distributed across the cortex. Using the unprecedented sample from the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) study and a novel application of a multivariate statistical approach (MOSTest), we have discovered specific distributed regionalization patterns across the cortex associated with cognition across multiple cognitive domains. This furthers our understanding of the relationship between brain structure and cognition, namely that these associations are not sparse and localized as assumed with traditional neuroimaging analyses. This multivariate method is extremely versatile and can be used in several different applications.

scholarly journals Leveraging genome characteristics to improve gene discovery for putamen subcortical brain structure

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Chi-Hua Chen ◽  
Yunpeng Wang ◽  
Min-Tzu Lo ◽  
Andrew Schork ◽  
Chun-Chieh Fan ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Brain Structure ◽  
Gene Discovery ◽  
Subcortical Brain ◽  
Subcortical Brain Structure
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