Height and general cognitive ability are positively associated, but the underlying mechanisms of this relationship are not well understood. Both height and general cognitive ability are positively associated with brain size. Still, the neural substrate of the height-cognitive ability association is unclear. We used a sample of 515 middle-aged male twins with structural magnetic resonance imaging data to investigate whether the association between height and cognitive ability is mediated by cortical size. In addition to cortical volume, we used genetically, ontogenetically and phylogenetically distinct cortical metrics of total cortical surface area and mean cortical thickness. Height was positively associated with general cognitive ability and total cortical volume and cortical surface area, but not with mean cortical thickness. Mediation models indicated that the well-replicated height-general cognitive ability association is accounted for by individual differences in total cortical volume and cortical surface area (highly heritable metrics related to global brain size), and that the genetic association between cortical surface area and general cognitive ability underlies the phenotypic height-general cognitive ability relationship.
Last. Ian J. Deary(Edin.: University of Edinburgh)H-Index: 184
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Abstract Fully characterizing age differences in the brain is a key task for combatting ageing-related cognitive decline. Using propensity score matching on two independent, narrow-age cohorts, we used data on childhood cognitive ability, socioeconomic background, and intracranial volume to match participants at mean age 92 years ( n = 42) to very similar participants at mean age 73 ( n = 126). Examining a variety of global and regional structural neuroimaging variables, there were large differe...
Regional cortical brain volume is the product of surface area and thickness. These measures exhibit partially distinct trajectories of change across the brain’s cortex in older age, but it is unclear which cortical characteristics at which loci are sensitive to cognitive ageing differences. We examine associations between change in intelligence from age 11 to 73 years and regional cortical volume, surface area, and thickness measured at age 73 years in 568 community-dwelling older adults, all bo...
The influence of exposure to impoverished environments on brain development is unexplored since most studies investigated how environmental impoverishment affects adult brain. To shed light on the impact of early impoverishment on developmental trajectories of the nervous system, we developed a protocol of environmental impoverishment in which dams and pups lived from birth in a condition of reduced sensory-motor stimulation. Focusing on visual system, we measured two indexes of functional devel...
Abstract Cortical maturation, including age-related changes in thickness, volume, surface area, and folding (gyrification), play a central role in developing brain function and plasticity. Further, abnormal cortical maturation is a suspected substrate in various behavioral, intellectual, and psychiatric disorders. However, in order to characterize the altered development associated with these disorders, appreciation of the normative patterns of cortical development in neurotypical children betwe...
Adolescence is a period of significant brain changes; however, the effects of age and sex on cortical development are yet to be fully characterized. Here, we utilized innovative intrinsic curvature (IC) analysis, along with the traditional cortical measures [cortical thickness (CT), local gyrification index (LGI), and surface area (SA)], to investigate how these indices (1) relate to each other and (2) depend on age and sex in adolescent cortical development. T1-weighted magnetic resonance image...
Last. Hong Xian(SLU: Saint Louis University)H-Index: 59
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: In this longitudinal study we examined the stability of general cognitive ability (GCA), as well as heterogeneity and genetic and environmental influences underlying individual differences in change. We investigated GCA from young adulthood through late midlife in 1,288 Vietnam Era Twin Study of Aging participants at ages ∼20, ∼56, and ∼62 years. The correlations among the 3 occasions ranged from .73 to .85, reflecting substantial stability. The heritability was significant on each of the 3 oc...
#1Hieab H.H. Adams(EUR: Erasmus University Rotterdam)H-Index: 29
#2Derrek P. Hibar(SC: University of Southern California)H-Index: 49
Last. Paul M. Thompson(SC: University of Southern California)H-Index: 201
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Intracranial volume reflects the maximally attained brain size during development, and remains stable with loss of tissue in late life. It is highly heritable, but the underlying genes remain largely undetermined. In a genome-wide association study of 32,438 adults, we discovered five previously unknown loci for intracranial volume and confirmed two known signals. Four of the loci were also associated with adult human stature, but these remained associated with intracranial volume after adjustin...
#2Caroline E. Brett(LJMU: Liverpool John Moores University)H-Index: 19
Last. John M. Starr(Edin.: University of Edinburgh)H-Index: 120
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Abstract Background Intelligence is related to both height and body mass index (BMI) at various stages of life. Several studies have demonstrated longitudinal relationships between these measures, but none has established whether height and intelligence, or BMI and intelligence are linked from childhood through to older age. Methods We assessed the relations between these measures over an interval of up to 67 years using data from the 36-Day Sample, an initially-representative sample of Scottish...
Neurodevelopmental origins of functional variation in older age are increasingly being acknowledged, but identification of how early factors impact human brain and cognition throughout life has rem ...
Being taller is associated with enhanced longevity, and higher education and earnings. We reanalysed 1472 population-based studies, with measurement of height on more than 18.6 million participants to estimate mean height for people born between 1896 and 1996 in 200 countries. The largest gain in adult height over the past century has occurred in South Korean women and Iranian men, who became 20.2 cm (95% credible interval 17.5–22.7) and 16.5 cm (13.3–19.7) taller, respectively. In contrast, the...
#2Fangfei Xie(Nanjing Medical University)H-Index: 1
Last. Zhongxiao Wan(Soochow University (Suzhou))H-Index: 13
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AIM The association between adult height and follow-up cognition requires an update in China. We aimed to examine the association between baseline height and follow-up cognitive trajectories in Chinese subjects from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS). METHODS A total of 6508 adults aged 45 years or older from the CHARLS were included for analysis. Latent class growth modeling was used to determine cognitive trajectories of 2011, 2013 and 2015. Multivariable linear regres...
Last. Sean C.L. Deoni(BMGF: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation)H-Index: 3
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Early childhood is a period marked by rapid brain growth accompanied by cognitive and motor development. However, it remains unclear how early developmental skills relate to neuroanatomical growth across time with no growth quantile trajectories of typical brain development currently available to place and compare individual neuroanatomical development. Even though longitudinal neuroimaging data have become more common, they are often sparse, making dynamic analyses at subject level a challengin...
Abstract Background Adolescence is a critical developmental stage. A key challenge is to characterize how variation in adolescent brain organization relates to psychosocial and environmental influences. Methods We used canonical correlation analysis to discover distinct patterns of covariation between measures of brain organization (brain morphometry, intracortical myelination, white matter integrity, and resting-state functional connectivity) and individual, psychosocial, and environmental fact...
Abstract Background Prenatal sex hormones may not exclusively determine effects of hand preference on digit ratios. Genetic determination is an alternative possibility. Aim To study the likelihood of similar effects of hand preference on digit lengths and digit ratios. Methods We selected similar numbers of left-handers and right-handers in samples of kindergarten children (N = 101, age range: 3.5–7 years) and adults (N = 189, age range: 17–28 years) and measured digit lengths (excluding the thu...
Very little is known about the etiology of personality and psychiatric disorders. Because the core neurobiology of many such traits is evolutionarily conserved, dogs present a powerful model. We previously reported genome scans of breed averages of ten traits related to fear, anxiety, aggression and social behavior in multiple cohorts of pedigree dogs. As a second phase of that discovery, here we tested the ability of markers at 13 of those loci to predict canine behavior in a community sample o...
Last. Miguel E. Rentería(QIMR: QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute)H-Index: 19
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Abstract It is well established that higher cognitive ability is associated with larger brain size. However, individual variation in intelligence exists despite brain size and recent studies have shown that a simple unifactorial view of the neurobiology underpinning cognitive ability is probably unrealistic. Educational attainment (EA) is often used as a proxy for cognitive ability since it is easily measured, resulting in large sample sizes and, consequently, sufficient statistical power to det...
Last. Susan Mérillat(UZH: University of Zurich)H-Index: 19
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The question whether body height is related to different brain size measures has recently gained renewed interest as some studies have reported that body height correlates with intelligence and several brain size measures. In this study, we re-evaluated this question by examining the relationship between body height and different brain size measures including intracranial volume, total brain volume, total cortical surface area, total cortical volume, volume of normal appearing white matter, whit...
: There is a pressing need to identify markers of cognitive and neural decline in healthy late-midlife participants. We explored the relationship between cross-sectional structural brain-imaging derived phenotypes (IDPs) and cognitive ability, demographic, health and lifestyle factors (non-IDPs). Participants were recruited from the 1953 Danish Male Birth Cohort (N=193). Applying an extreme group design, members were selected in 2 groups based on cognitive change between IQ at age ~20y (IQ-20) a...