Longitudinal Cognitive Changes in Cerebral Small Vessel Disease: The Effect of White Matter Hyperintensity Regression and Progression.

Background And Objectives: White matter hyperintensities (WMHs) are the commonest imaging marker of cerebral small vessel disease (SVD) and a major cause of cognitive decline and vascular dementia. WMHs typically accumulate over time, but recent studies show they can also regress, but potential clinical benefits have received little attention. We examined progressing, stable, and regressing WMH in people with stroke-related SVD and the effect on cognitive outcomes.

Blood-based epigenome-wide association study and prediction of alcohol consumption.

Alcohol consumption is an important risk factor for multiple diseases. It is typically assessed via self-report, which is open to measurement error through recall bias. Instead, molecular data such as blood-based DNA methylation (DNAm) could be used to derive a more objective measure of alcohol consumption by incorporating information from cytosine-phosphate-guanine (CpG) sites known to be linked to the trait.

Clinical Relevance of 'Cap' and 'Track' Development after Recent Small Subcortical Infarct.

Objective: After a recent small subcortical infarct (RSSI), some patients develop perilesional or remote hyperintensities ('caps/tracks') to the index infarct on T2/FLAIR MRI. However, their clinical relevance remains unclear. We investigated the clinicoradiological correlates of 'caps/tracks', and their impact on long-term outcomes following RSSI.

Brain maps of general cognitive function and spatial correlations with neurobiological cortical profiles.

In this paper, we attempt to answer two questions: 1) which regions of the human brain, in terms of morphometry, are most strongly related to individual differences in domain-general cognitive functioning ()? and 2) what are the underlying neurobiological properties of those regions? We meta-analyse vertex-wise -cortical morphometry (volume, surface area, thickness, curvature and sulcal depth) associations using data from 3 cohorts: the UK Biobank (UKB), Generation Scotland (GenScot), and the Lothian Birth Cohort 1936 (LBC1936), with the meta-analytic = 38,379 (age range = 44 to 84 years old). These -morphometry associations vary in magnitude and direction across the cortex (|β| range = -0.12 to 0.

The neonatal gut microbiota: A role in the encephalopathy of prematurity.

Preterm birth correlates with brain dysmaturation and neurocognitive impairment. The gut microbiome associates with behavioral outcomes in typical development, but its relationship with neurodevelopment in preterm infants is unknown. We characterize fecal microbiome in a cohort of 147 neonates enriched for very preterm birth using 16S-based and shotgun metagenomic sequencing.