Cerebral Cortex Advance Access originally published online on March 18, 2009
Cerebral Cortex 2009 19(11):2728-2735; doi:10.1093/cercor/bhp026
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Distinct Genetic Influences on Cortical Surface Area and Cortical Thickness
1 Department of Psychiatry, 2 Department of Radiology, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA, 3 San Diego Veterans Administration Health Care System, San Diego, CA 92161, USA, 4 Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics, Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine, Richmond, VA 23219, USA, 5 Department of Psychiatry, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA, 6 Department of Psychology, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215, USA, 7 Department of Psychiatry, Washington University School of Medicine, St Louis, MO 63130, USA, 8 Center for Behavioral Genomics, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA, 9 Harvard Institute of Psychiatric Epidemiology and Genetics, Harvard Medical School and School of Public Health, Boston, MA 02115, USA, 10 Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA 02129, USA, 11 Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115, USA, 12 Department of Neurosciences, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA
Address correspondence to Dr Matthew S. Panizzon, Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive (MC 0738), La Jolla, CA 92093-0738, USA. Email: mspanizz{at}ucsd.edu.
Neuroimaging studies examining the effects of aging and neuropsychiatric disorders on the cerebral cortex have largely been based on measures of cortical volume. Given that cortical volume is a product of thickness and surface area, it is plausible that measures of volume capture at least 2 distinct sets of genetic influences. The present study aims to examine the genetic relationships between measures of cortical surface area and thickness. Participants were men in the Vietnam Era Twin Study of Aging (110 monozygotic pairs and 92 dizygotic pairs). Mean age was 55.8 years (range: 51–59). Bivariate twin analyses were utilized in order to estimate the heritability of cortical surface area and thickness, as well as their degree of genetic overlap. Total cortical surface area and average cortical thickness were both highly heritable (0.89 and 0.81, respectively) but were essentially unrelated genetically (genetic correlation = 0.08). This pattern was similar at the lobar and regional levels of analysis. These results demonstrate that cortical volume measures combine at least 2 distinct sources of genetic influences. We conclude that using volume in a genetically informative study, or as an endophenotype for a disorder, may confound the underlying genetic architecture of brain structure.
Key Words: cortical volume • genetic correlation • heritability • magnetic resonance imaging • twin study
CiteULike 
Connotea 
Del.icio.us What's this?
This article has been cited by other articles:
|
|
 |
|
  Y. Ostby, C. K. Tamnes, A. M. Fjell, L. T. Westlye, P. Due-Tonnessen, and K. B. Walhovd Heterogeneity in Subcortical Brain Development: A Structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study of Brain Maturation from 8 to 30 Years J. Neurosci., September 23, 2009; 29(38): 11772 - 11782. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|