Publications by authors named "Clara A Moreau"

Article Synopsis
  • Early-onset restrictive eating disorders (rEO-ED), including early-onset anorexia nervosa (EO-AN) and avoidant restrictive food intake disorders (ARFID), have unknown impacts on brain development.
  • A study comparing brain features through MRI in children under 13 with EO-AN, ARFID, and typically developing peers revealed differing brain structures despite similar BMI, indicating unique brain mechanisms for each disorder.
  • Findings suggest EO-AN is linked to thinner cortex structures, while ARFID patients showed reduced surface area and subcortical volume, highlighting the need for further research on the relationship between low BMI and neurodevelopmental impacts in eating disorders.
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There is widespread overlap across major psychiatric disorders, and this is the case at different levels of observations, from genetic variants to brain structures and function and to symptoms. However, it remains unknown to what extent these commonalities at different levels of observation map onto each other. Here, we systematically review and compare the degree of similarity between psychiatric disorders at all available levels of observation.

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Asymmetry between the left and right hemisphere is a key feature of brain organization. Hemispheric functional specialization underlies some of the most advanced human-defining cognitive operations, such as articulated language, perspective taking, or rapid detection of facial cues. Yet, genetic investigations into brain asymmetry have mostly relied on common variants, which typically exert small effects on brain-related phenotypes.

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Reciprocal Copy Number Variants (CNVs) at the 16p11.2 locus confer high risk for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and other neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs). Morphometric MRI studies have revealed large and pervasive volumetric alterations in carriers of a 16p11.

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Article Synopsis
  • Carriers of specific genetic variants (1q21.1 distal and 15q11.2 BP1-BP2) show both regional and global brain structure differences compared to noncarriers, but analyzing these differences can be complicated.
  • The study used MRI data from various groups (carriers and noncarriers) to assess how regional brain characteristics diverge from overall brain structure differences.
  • Findings revealed that certain brain regions in carriers exhibited distinct patterns of cortical surface area and thickness that deviated from the global average, suggesting more complex effects of these genetic variants on brain development.
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Asymmetry between the left and right brain is a key feature of brain organization. Hemispheric functional specialization underlies some of the most advanced human-defining cognitive operations, such as articulated language, perspective taking, or rapid detection of facial cues. Yet, genetic investigations into brain asymmetry have mostly relied on common variant studies, which typically exert small effects on brain phenotypes.

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Copy number variations (CNVs) are rare genomic deletions and duplications that can affect brain and behaviour. Previous reports of CNV pleiotropy imply that they converge on shared mechanisms at some level of pathway cascades, from genes to large-scale neural circuits to the phenome. However, existing studies have primarily examined single CNV loci in small clinical cohorts.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study investigates how different genetic factors, including oligogenic and polygenic variants, affect brain connectivity related to psychiatric disorders, aiming to better understand these complex relationships.
  • The research utilized resting-state functional MRI data from multiple datasets, conducting extensive connectome-wide association studies on various genetic risk factors and psychiatric conditions involving thousands of subjects.
  • Results showed that the impact on brain connectivity is strongest with psychiatric copy number variants (CNVs), while polygenic risk scores (PRSs) had relatively low effects, highlighting the challenges posed by genetic diversity in studying psychiatric conditions.
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Pleiotropy occurs when a genetic variant influences more than one trait. This is a key property of the genomic architecture of psychiatric disorders and has been observed for rare and common genomic variants. It is reasonable to hypothesize that the microscale genetic overlap (pleiotropy) across psychiatric conditions and cognitive traits may lead to similar overlaps at the macroscale brain level such as large-scale brain functional networks.

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Multi-site imaging studies can increase statistical power and improve the reproducibility and generalizability of findings, yet data often need to be harmonized. One alternative to data harmonization in the normative modeling setting is Hierarchical Bayesian Regression (HBR), which overcomes some of the weaknesses of data harmonization. Here, we test the utility of three model types, i.

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Objective: Copy number variants (CNVs) are strongly associated with neurodevelopmental and psychotic disorders. Early-onset psychosis (EOP), where symptoms appear before 18 years of age, is thought to be more strongly influenced by genetic factors than adult-onset psychotic disorders. However, the prevalence and effect of CNVs in EOP is unclear.

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Pathogenic copy number variants (CNVs) and aneuploidies alter gene dosage and are associated with neurodevelopmental psychiatric disorders such as autism spectrum disorder and schizophrenia. Brain mechanisms mediating genetic risk for neurodevelopmental psychiatric disorders remain largely unknown, but there is a rapid increase in morphometry studies of CNVs using T1-weighted structural magnetic resonance imaging. Studies have been conducted one mutation at a time, leaving the field with a complex catalog of brain alterations linked to different genomic loci.

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Copy Number Variants (CNVs) are associated with elevated rates of neuropsychiatric disorders. A 'genetics-first' approach, involving the CNV effects on the brain, irrespective of clinical symptomatology, allows investigation of mechanisms underlying neuropsychiatric disorders in the general population. Recent years have seen an increasing number of larger multisite neuroimaging studies investigating the effect of CNVs on structural and functional brain endophenotypes.

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Neuroimaging genomic studies of autism spectrum disorder and schizophrenia have mainly adopted a 'top-down' approach, beginning with the behavioural diagnosis, and moving down to intermediate brain phenotypes and underlying genetic factors. Advances in imaging and genomics have been successfully applied to increasingly large case-control studies. As opposed to diagnostic-first approaches, the bottom-up strategy begins at the level of molecular factors enabling the study of mechanisms related to biological risk, irrespective of diagnoses or clinical manifestations.

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The Enhancing NeuroImaging Genetics through Meta-Analysis copy number variant (ENIGMA-CNV) and 22q11.2 Deletion Syndrome Working Groups (22q-ENIGMA WGs) were created to gain insight into the involvement of genetic factors in human brain development and related cognitive, psychiatric and behavioral manifestations. To that end, the ENIGMA-CNV WG has collated CNV and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data from ~49,000 individuals across 38 global research sites, yielding one of the largest studies to date on the effects of CNVs on brain structures in the general population.

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Article Synopsis
  • Open science relies on sharing research data openly, especially in human studies, which requires obtaining consent from participants to ensure ethical standards are upheld.
  • Laws and regulations exist to protect participant privacy, but researchers often find it challenging to understand and comply with these requirements.
  • The Open Brain Consent initiative assists brain imaging researchers by providing resources, including compliant consent forms and user agreements, to facilitate ethical data sharing both in the EU and globally.
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16p11.2 and 22q11.2 Copy Number Variants (CNVs) confer high risk for Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), schizophrenia (SZ), and Attention-Deficit-Hyperactivity-Disorder (ADHD), but their impact on functional connectivity (FC) remains unclear.

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Metadata are what makes databases searchable. Without them, researchers would have difficulty finding data with features they are interested in. Brain imaging genetics is at the intersection of two disciplines, each with dedicated dictionaries and ontologies facilitating data search and analysis.

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