Publications by authors named "Sander Lamballais"

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  • Neuroaxonal loss may begin early in multiple sclerosis (MS), but it's unclear if this is due to inflammation or neurodegeneration related to genetics and environment during childhood.
  • A study analyzed the impact of genetic risk scores and childhood environmental factors, like Epstein-Barr virus exposure and parental smoking, on brain MRI outcomes in children aged 9 and 13.
  • Findings suggest that genetic predisposition and exposure to parental smoking can reduce brain volumes, indicating potential strategies for early MS prevention in at-risk individuals.
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Thanks to methodological advances, large-scale data collections, and longitudinal designs, psychiatric neuroimaging is better equipped than ever to identify the neurobiological underpinnings of youth mental health problems. However, the complexity of such endeavors has become increasingly evident, as the field has been confronted by limited clinical relevance, inconsistent results, and small effect sizes. Some of these challenges parallel those historically encountered by psychiatric genetics.

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  • Hostility in parents is linked to increased aggression and attention issues in children, and this study explored how it affects brain structure in both parents and children using neuroimaging.
  • The study involved a cohort of 484 families, assessing parental hostility at various stages and measuring brain volumes in mothers, fathers, and their children through MRI scans.
  • Findings indicated that prenatal maternal hostility was related to reduced brain volumes in children, suggesting parental hostility can have lasting neurodevelopmental effects that contribute to behavioral problems in their offspring.
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  • Artificially sweetened beverages (ASB) have been linked to increased risks of all-cause and cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality based on a comprehensive review of 11 studies involving over 2 million participants.
  • The analysis showed that higher ASB intake correlated with 13% and 26% higher risks for all-cause and CVD mortality, respectively; however, there was no significant link found with cancer mortality.
  • Replacing one sugary drink with ASB may reduce the risk of mortality by 4-6%, but the overall quality of evidence concerning ASB’s health effects was rated as moderate.
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  • * Neuroimaging reveals that many of these genetic variants have widespread effects on brain regions and are linked to various cancers and specific signaling pathways, such as p53 and Wnt.
  • * The findings suggest a connection between the genes that regulate head size and the likelihood of cancer, emphasizing the need for further research on the implications of this relationship.
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Background: The American Heart Association recently released an updated algorithm for evaluating cardiovascular health-Life's Essential 8 (LE8). However, the associations between changes in LE8 score over time and risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) remain unclear.

Methods: We investigated associations between 6-year changes (2006-12) in LE8 score and risk of subsequent CVD events (2012-20) among 53 363 Chinese men and women from the Kailuan Study, who were free from CVD in 2012.

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  • The study examines the effects of phthalate exposure during pregnancy on brain development in children, using data from 775 mother-child pairs.
  • It found that higher maternal levels of monoethyl phthalate (mEP) correlate with reduced gray matter volumes in children by age 10, which is linked to lower IQ at age 14.
  • Additionally, a similar effect was observed in girls concerning monoisobutyl phthalate (mIBP) and white matter volumes, indicating that prenatal phthalate exposure negatively impacts cognitive development into adolescence.
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Objective: Youth with symptoms of emotion dysregulation are at risk for a multitude of psychiatric diagnoses later in life. However, few studies have focused on the underlying neurobiology of emotion dysregulation. This study assessed the bidirectional relationship between emotion dysregulation symptoms and brain morphology throughout childhood and adolescence.

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Depressive symptoms differ in severity and stability over time. Trajectories depicting these changes, particularly those with high late-life depressive symptoms, have been associated with poor brain health at old age. To better understand these associations across the lifespan, we examined depressive symptoms trajectories in relation to brain health in middle age.

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Background: Associations between attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and brain morphology have been reported, although with several inconsistencies. These may partly stem from confounding bias, which could distort associations and limit generalizability. We examined how associations between brain morphology and ADHD symptoms change with adjustments for potential confounders typically overlooked in the literature (aim 1), and for the intelligence quotient (IQ) and head motion, which are generally corrected for but play ambiguous roles (aim 2).

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The field of psychiatry increasingly highlights the importance of studying not only the influence of the brain on behavior, but also the long-term influences that the persistence of specific behaviors can have on the brain. A severe behavioral phenotype that puts children at risk for later psychopathology is the Child Behavior Checklist-Dysregulation Profile (CBCL-DP). In earlier work, Shaw et al.

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Background: Cognitive reserve aims to explain individual differences in the susceptibility to the functional impact of dementia in the presence of equal amount of neuropathological damage. It is thought to be shaped by a combination of innate individual differences and lifetime exposures. Which determinants are associated with cognitive reserve remains unknown.

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  • The study focuses on interocular distance (orbital telorism), a key craniofacial trait that can indicate certain genetic disorders but is not well understood in the general population.
  • Researchers measured this distance using cranial MRI, finding high reproducibility, with 76% heritability estimates from family studies and 39% from genetic analysis of a larger group.
  • A genome-wide association study identified 56 significant genetic loci related to interocular distance, with many of these loci being new discoveries and related to genetic conditions like hypotelorism and hypertelorism, highlighting their importance in facial morphology and potential clinical applications.
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Imaging genetic studies aim to test how genetic information influences brain structure and function by combining neuroimaging-based brain features and genetic data from the same individual. Most studies focus on individual correlation and association tests between genetic variants and a single measurement of the brain. Despite the great success of univariate approaches, given the capacity of neuroimaging methods to provide a multiplicity of cerebral phenotypes, the development and application of multivariate methods become crucial.

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Brain pathology develops at different rates between individuals with similar burden of risk factors, possibly explained by brain resistance. We examined if education contributes to brain resistance by studying its influence on the association between vascular risk factors and brain pathology. In 4111 stroke-free and dementia-free community-dwelling participants (62.

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The cerebral cortex is fundamental to the functioning of the mind and body. cortical morphology can be studied through magnetic resonance imaging in several ways, including reconstructing surface-based models of the cortex. However, existing software for surface-based statistical analyses cannot accommodate "big data" or commonly used statistical methods such as the imputation of missing data, extensive bias correction, and non-linear modeling.

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Background: A higher cognitive reserve and brain reserve could decrease mortality risk, but the interaction of these factors with general age-related loss of physical fitness (eg, frailty) remains unclear with regards to mortality. We investigated the associations of cognitive and brain reserve with mortality and the interaction of cognitive and brain reserve with frailty within these associations.

Methods: Within the observational population-based cohort of the Rotterdam Study, we included participants who visited the research centre for a cognitive assessment between March 2, 2009, and March 1, 2012.

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  • Individual differences in subcortical brain volumes are largely determined by genetics, as shown in previous studies focused on adults.
  • This research explored whether the same genetic variants influencing brain volume in adults also impact subcortical regions in infants and young children, using data from the Generation R prospective birth cohort.
  • Results indicated that polygenic scores relating to subcortical volumes were primarily associated with brain volume at age 10 and also connected to early measurements taken at 7 weeks, suggesting these genetic factors affect brain development both before and after birth.
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Brain morphology is altered in both anorexia nervosa and obesity. However, it is yet unclear if the relationship between Body Mass Index-Standard Deviation Score (BMI-SDS) and brain morphology exists across the BMI-SDS spectrum, or is present only in the extremes. The study involved 3160 9-to-11 year-old children (50.

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Understanding the development of white matter microstructure in the general population is an imperative precursor to identifying its involvement in psychopathology. Previous studies have reported changes in white matter microstructure associated with age and different developmental patterns between boys and girls. Handedness has also been related to white matter in adults.

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  • Brain development and decline throughout life play a crucial role in understanding late-life neurodegenerative diseases, with various risk and protective factors still needing exploration.
  • The ORACLE Study aims to fill this knowledge gap by examining brain health across generations, linking data from children in the Generation R study to their parents in the Rotterdam Study.
  • It includes extensive assessments of brain health for nearly 2000 parents, alongside factors like migraine and sleep, while particularly focusing on mothers with pregnancy-related complications for insights on high-risk populations.
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A combination of genetic and environmental factors contributes to the origins of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). While a number of studies have described specific environmental factors associating with emerging ASD, studies that compare and contrast multiple environmental factors in the same study are lacking. Thus, the goal of this study was to perform a prospective, data-driven environmental-wide association study of pre- and perinatal factors associated with the later development of autistic symptoms in childhood.

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Background: Prenatal exposure to organophosphate (OP) pesticides associate with impaired neurodevelopment in humans and animal models. However, much uncertainty exists about the brain structural alterations underlying these associations. The objective of this study was to determine whether maternal OP pesticide metabolite concentrations in urine repeatedly measured during gestation are associated with brain morphology and white matter microstructure in 518 preadolescents aged 9-12 years.

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Background: Individual differences in the risk to develop dementia remain poorly understood. These differences may partly be explained through reserve, which is the ability to buffer cognitive decline due to neuropathology and age.

Objective: To determine how much early and late-life cognitive reserve (CR) and brain reserve (BR) contribute to the risk of dementia.

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