Adherence to Life's Essential 8 is associated with delayed white matter aging.

Importance: The American Heart Association introduced Life's Essential 8 (LE8) as a checklist of healthy lifestyle factors to help older individuals maintain and improve cardiovascular health and live longer. How LE8 can foster healthy brain aging and interact with genetic risk factors to render the aging brain less vulnerable to dementia is not well understood.

Objective: To investigate the impact of LE8 on the white matter brain aging and the moderating effects of the allele.

Accelerating Heritability, Genetic Correlation, and Genome-Wide Association Imaging Genetic Analyses in Complex Pedigrees.

National and international biobanking efforts led to the collection of large and inclusive imaging genetics datasets that enable examination of the contribution of genetic and environmental factors to human brains in illness and health. High-resolution neuroimaging (~10 voxels) and genetic (10 single nucleotide polymorphic [SNP] variants) data are available in statistically powerful (N = 10) epidemiological and disorder-focused samples. Performing imaging genetics analyses at full resolution afforded in these datasets is a formidable computational task even under the assumption of unrelatedness among the subjects.

TIPS: a novel pathway-guided joint model for transcriptome-wide association studies.

In the past two decades, genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have pinpointed numerous SNPs linked to human diseases and traits, yet many of these SNPs are in non-coding regions and hard to interpret. Transcriptome-wide association studies (TWAS) integrate GWAS and expression reference panels to identify the associations at gene level with tissue specificity, potentially improving the interpretability. However, the list of individual genes identified from univariate TWAS contains little unifying biological theme, leaving the underlying mechanisms largely elusive.

A Site-Wise Reliability Analysis of the ABCD Diffusion Fractional Anisotropy and Cortical Thickness: Impact of Scanner Platforms.

The Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) project is the largest study of adolescent brain development. ABCD longitudinally tracks 11,868 participants aged 9-10 years from 21 sites using standardized protocols for multi-site MRI data collection and analysis. While the multi-site and multi-scanner study design enhances the robustness and generalizability of analysis results, it may also introduce nonbiological variances including scanner-related variations, subject motion, and deviations from protocols.

Tobacco Smoking Functional Networks: A Whole-Brain Connectome Analysis in 24,539 Individuals.

Introduction: Nicotine addiction, a multifaceted neuropsychiatric disorder, profoundly impacts brain functions through interactions with neural pathways. Despite its significance, the impact of tobacco smoking on the whole-brain functional connectome remains largely unexplored.

Methods: We conducted a whole-brain analysis on 24,539 adults aged 40 and above from the UK Biobank cohort.

Nongenetic and Genetic Factors Associated with White Matter Brain Aging: Exposome-Wide and Genome-Wide Association Study.

Background/objectives: Human brain aging is a complex process that affects various aspects of brain function and structure, increasing susceptibility to neurological and psychiatric disorders. A number of nongenetic (e.g.

A multivariate to multivariate approach for voxel-wise genome-wide association analysis.

The joint analysis of imaging-genetics data facilitates the systematic investigation of genetic effects on brain structures and functions with spatial specificity. We focus on voxel-wise genome-wide association analysis, which may involve trillions of single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP)-voxel pairs. We attempt to identify underlying organized association patterns of SNP-voxel pairs and understand the polygenic and pleiotropic networks on brain imaging traits.

Relative efficacy of masks and respirators as source control for viral aerosol shedding from people infected with SARS-CoV-2: a controlled human exhaled breath aerosol experimental study.

Background: Tight-fitting masks and respirators, in manikin studies, improved aerosol source control compared to loose-fitting masks. Whether this translates to humans is not known.

Methods: We compared efficacy of masks (cloth and surgical) and respirators (KN95 and N95) as source control for SARS-CoV-2 viral load in exhaled breath of volunteers with COVID-19 using a controlled human experimental study.

The Effect of Broccoli Glucoraphanin Supplementation on Ameliorating High-Fat-Diet-Induced Obesity through the Gut Microbiome and Metabolome Interface.

Scope: Obesity and its metabolic comorbidities pose a major global challenge for public health. Glucoraphanin (GRN) is a natural bioactive compound enriched in broccoli that is known to have potential health benefits against various human chronic diseases.

Methods And Results: This study investigats the effects of broccoli GRN supplementation on body weight, metabolic parameters, gut microbiome and metabolome associated with obesity.

Exploring Psychosocial and Structural Syndemic Effects as Predictors of HIV Risk Behaviors Among Black Women (HPTN 064).

Syndemic models have been used in previous studies exploring HIV-related outcomes; however, these models do not fully consider intersecting psychosocial (, substance use, depressive symptoms) and structural factors (unstable housing, concentrated housing vacancy) that influence the lived experiences of women. Therefore, there is a need to explore the syndemic effects of psychosocial and structural factors on HIV risk behaviors to better explain the multilevel factors shaping HIV disparities among black women. This analysis uses baseline data (May 2009-August 2010) from non-Hispanic black women enrolled in the HIV Prevention Trials Network 064 Women's Seroincidence Study (HPTN 064) and the American Community Survey 5-year estimates from 2007 to 2011.

The causal effect of HbA1c on white matter brain aging by two-sample Mendelian randomization analysis.

Background: Poor glycemic control with elevated levels of hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) is associated with increased risk of cognitive impairment, with potentially varying effects between sexes. However, the causal impact of poor glycemic control on white matter brain aging in men and women is uncertain.

Methods: We used two nonoverlapping data sets from UK Biobank cohort: gene-outcome group (with neuroimaging data, ( = 15,193; males/females: 7,101/8,092)) and gene-exposure group (without neuroimaging data, ( = 279,011; males/females: 122,638/156,373)).

Bayesian response adaptive randomization design with a composite endpoint of mortality and morbidity.

Allocating patients to treatment arms during a trial based on the observed responses accumulated up to the decision point, and sequential adaptation of this allocation, could minimize the expected number of failures or maximize total benefits to patients. In this study, we developed a Bayesian response-adaptive randomization (RAR) design targeting the endpoint of organ support-free days (OSFD) for patients admitted to the intensive care units. The OSFD is a mixture of mortality and morbidity assessed by the number of days of free of organ support within a predetermined post-randomization time-window.

Erratum: Separating Clinical and Subclinical Depression by Big Data Informed Structural Vulnerability Index and Its impact on Cognition: ENIGMA Dot Product.

In the PSB article published in Biocomputing 2022: Proceedings of the Pacific Symposium, pp. 133-143; doi: 10.1142/9789811250477_0013 (https://www.

Systems approach for congruence and selection of cancer models towards precision medicine.

Cancer models are instrumental as a substitute for human studies and to expedite basic, translational, and clinical cancer research. For a given cancer type, a wide selection of models, such as cell lines, patient-derived xenografts, organoids and genetically modified murine models, are often available to researchers. However, how to quantify their congruence to human tumors and to select the most appropriate cancer model is a largely unsolved issue.

Community health worker training to reduce mental health and substance use stigma towards patients who have disengaged from HIV/TB care in South Africa: protocol for a stepped wedge hybrid type II pilot implementation trial.

Background: South Africa has deployed community health workers (CHWs) to support individuals to enter and stay in HIV/TB care. Although CHWs routinely encounter patients with mental health (particularly depression) and substance use (SU) conditions that impact their engagement in HIV/TB care, CHWs are rarely trained in how to work with these patients. This contributes to mental health and SU stigma among CHWs, a known barrier to patient engagement in care.

poses opposite effects of plasma LDL on white matter integrity in older adults.

Introduction: APOE4 is a strong genetic risk factor of Alzheimer's disease and is associated with changes in metabolism. However, the interactive relationship between APOE4 and plasma metabolites on the brain remains largely unknown.

Mehods: In the UK Biobank, we investigated the moderation effects of APOE4 on the relationship between 249 plasma metabolites derived from nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy on whole-brain white matter integrity, measured by fractional anisotropy using diffusion magnetic resonance imaging.

An in-depth association analysis of genetic variants within nicotine-related loci: Meeting in middle of GWAS and genetic fine-mapping.

In the last two decades of Genome-wide association studies (GWAS), nicotine-dependence-related genetic loci (e.g., nicotinic acetylcholine receptor - nAChR subunit genes) are among the most replicable genetic findings.

Deciphering the causal relationship between blood pressure and regional white matter integrity: A two-sample Mendelian randomization study.

Elevated arterial blood pressure (BP) is a common risk factor for cerebrovascular and cardiovascular diseases, but no causal relationship has been established between BP and cerebral white matter (WM) integrity. In this study, we performed a two-sample Mendelian randomization (MR) analysis with individual-level data by defining two nonoverlapping sets of European ancestry individuals (genetics-exposure set: N = 203,111; mean age = 56.71 years, genetics-outcome set: N = 16,156; mean age = 54.