Our understanding of brain iron regulation and its disruption in disease is limited. Excess iron affects motor circuitry, contributing to Parkinson's disease (PD) risk. The molecular mechanisms regulating central iron levels, beyond a few well-known genes controlling peripheral iron, remain unclear.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis editorial focuses on the issue of data misuse which is increasingly evidenced in social media as well as some premiere scientific journals. This issue is of critical importance to open science projects in general, and ABCD in particular, given the broad array of biological, behavioral and environmental information collected on this American sample of 12.000 youth and parents.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStructural neuroimaging data have been used to compute an estimate of the biological age of the brain (brain-age) which has been associated with other biologically and behaviorally meaningful measures of brain development and aging. The ongoing research interest in brain-age has highlighted the need for robust and publicly available brain-age models pre-trained on data from large samples of healthy individuals. To address this need we have previously released a developmental brain-age model.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNeuroimaging is a popular method to map brain structural and functional patterns to complex human traits. Recently published observations cast doubt upon these prospects, particularly for prediction of cognitive traits from structural and resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). We leverage baseline data from thousands of children in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive DevelopmentSM Study to inform the replication sample size required with univariate and multivariate methods across different imaging modalities to detect reproducible brain-behavior associations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe relative contributions of genetic variation and experience in shaping the morphology of the adolescent brain are not fully understood. Using longitudinal data from 11,665 subjects in the ABCD Study, we fit vertex-wise variance components including family effects, genetic effects, and subject-level effects using a computationally efficient framework. Variance in cortical thickness and surface area is largely attributable to genetic influence, whereas sulcal depth is primarily explained by subject-level effects.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFImportance: The prevalence, pathophysiology, and long-term outcomes of COVID-19 (post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 [PASC] or "Long COVID") in children and young adults remain unknown. Studies must address the urgent need to define PASC, its mechanisms, and potential treatment targets in children and young adults.
Observations: We describe the protocol for the Pediatric Observational Cohort Study of the NIH's REsearching COVID to Enhance Recovery (RECOVER) Initiative.
The linear mixed-effects model (LME) is a versatile approach to account for dependence among observations. Many large-scale neuroimaging datasets with complex designs have increased the need for LME; however LME has seldom been used in whole-brain imaging analyses due to its heavy computational requirements. In this paper, we introduce a fast and efficient mixed-effects algorithm (FEMA) that makes whole-brain vertex-wise, voxel-wise, and connectome-wide LME analyses in large samples possible.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCross-sectional studies have linked differences in white matter tissue properties to reading skills. However, past studies have reported a range of, sometimes conflicting, results. Some studies suggest that white matter properties act as individual-level traits predictive of reading skill, whereas others suggest that reading skill and white matter develop as a function of an individual's educational experience.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe present an empirically benchmarked framework for sex-specific normative modeling of brain morphometry that can inform about the biological and behavioral significance of deviations from typical age-related neuroanatomical changes and support future study designs. This framework was developed using regional morphometric data from 37,407 healthy individuals (53% female; aged 3-90 years) following a comparative evaluation of eight algorithms and multiple covariate combinations pertaining to image acquisition and quality, parcellation software versions, global neuroimaging measures, and longitudinal stability. The Multivariate Factorial Polynomial Regression (MFPR) emerged as the preferred algorithm optimized using nonlinear polynomials for age and linear effects of global measures as covariates.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAttention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a complex disorder that manifests variability in long-term outcomes and clinical presentations. The genetic contributions to such heterogeneity are not well understood. Here we show several genetic links to clinical heterogeneity in ADHD in a case-only study of 14,084 diagnosed individuals.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study was launched by the Collaborative Research on Addiction at NIH (CRAN) in 2016 and is now supported by 11 other federal agencies and centers. The six primary aims of ABCD were to: Develop national standards for normal brain development for youth ages 9-19 years; Determine individual developmental trajectories (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMagnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a popular and useful non-invasive method to map patterns of brain structure and function to complex human traits. Recently published observations in multiple large scale studies cast doubt upon these prospects, particularly for prediction of cognitive traits from structural and resting state functional MRI, which seems to account for little behavioral variability. We leverage baseline data from thousands of children in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study to inform the replication sample size required with both univariate and multivariate methods across different imaging modalities to detect reproducible brain-behavior associations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFindings in adults have shown that crystallized measures of intelligence, which are more culturally sensitive than fluid intelligence measures, have greater heritability; however, these results have not been found in children. The present study used data from 8,518 participants between 9 and 11 years old from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study. We found that polygenic predictors of intelligence test performance (based on genome-wide association meta-analyses of data from 269,867 individuals) and of educational attainment (based on data from 1.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTwin and family studies have historically aimed to partition phenotypic variance into components corresponding to additive genetic effects (A), common environment (C), and unique environment (E). Here we present the ACE Model and several extensions in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development℠ Study (ABCD Study), employed using the new Fast Efficient Mixed Effects Analysis (FEMA) package. In the twin sub-sample (n = 924; 462 twin pairs), heritability estimates were similar to those reported by prior studies for height (twin heritability = 0.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCharacterizing the optimal fMRI paradigms for detecting behaviorally relevant functional connectivity (FC) patterns is a critical step to furthering our knowledge of the neural basis of behavior. Previous studies suggested that FC patterns derived from task fMRI paradigms, which we refer to as task-based FC, are better correlated with individual differences in behavior than resting-state FC, but the consistency and generalizability of this advantage across task conditions was not fully explored. Using data from resting-state fMRI and three fMRI tasks from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study ® (ABCD), we tested whether the observed improvement in behavioral prediction power of task-based FC can be attributed to changes in brain activity induced by the task design.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGenome-Wide Association studies have typically been limited to univariate analysis in which a single outcome measure is tested against millions of variants. Recent work demonstrates that a Multivariate Omnibus Statistic Test (MOSTest) is well powered to discover genomic effects distributed across multiple phenotypes. Applied to cortical brain MRI morphology measures, MOSTest has resulted in a drastic improvement in power to discover loci when compared to established approaches (min-P).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFImportance: Hereditary hemochromatosis (HH) is an autosomal recessive genetic disorder that leads to iron overload. Conflicting results from previous research has led some to believe the brain is spared the toxic effects of iron in HH.
Objective: To test the association of the strongest genetic risk variant for HH on brainwide measures sensitive to iron deposition and the rates of movement disorders in a substantially larger sample than previous studies of its kind.
J Child Psychol Psychiatry
December 2022
Background: Early detection is critical for easing the rising burden of psychiatric disorders. However, the specificity of psychopathological measurements and genetic predictors is unclear among youth.
Methods: We measured associations between genetic risk for psychopathology (polygenic risk scores (PRS) and family history (FH) measures) and a wide range of behavioral measures in a large sample (n = 5,204) of early adolescent participants (9-11 years) from the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development Study .
To determine the impact of genetic variants on the brain, we used genetically informed brain atlases in genome-wide association studies of regional cortical surface area and thickness in 39,898 adults and 9136 children. We uncovered 440 genome-wide significant loci in the discovery cohort and 800 from a post hoc combined meta-analysis. Loci in adulthood were largely captured in childhood, showing signatures of negative selection, and were linked to early neurodevelopment and pathways associated with neuropsychiatric risk.
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