Journal
CEREBRAL CORTEX
Volume 19, Issue 11, Pages 2728-2735Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS INC
DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhp026
Keywords
cortical volume; genetic correlation; heritability; magnetic resonance imaging; twin study
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Funding
- National Institutes of Health/National Institute on Aging [U24 RR021382, R01 AG18386, RO1 AG18384, RO1 AG22381, RO1 AG 22982]
- US Department of Veterans Affairs
- VA Cooperative Studies Program
- Department of Defense
- National Personnel Records Center, National Archives, and Records Administration
- Internal Revenue Service
- National Opinion Research Center
- National Research Council, National Academy of Sciences
- Institute for Survey Research, Temple University
- Schulman, Ronca, and Bucuvalas, Inc
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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.
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