Assessing the association between global structural brain age and polygenic risk for schizophrenia in early adulthood a recall-by-genotype study

Constantinides, Constantinos, Baltramonaityte, Vilte, Caramaschi, Doretta, Han, Laura, Lancaster, Thomas ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1322-2449, Zammit, Stanley ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2647-9211, Freeman, Tom and Walton, Esther 2024. Assessing the association between global structural brain age and polygenic risk for schizophrenia in early adulthood a recall-by-genotype study. Cortex 172 , pp. 1-13. 10.1016/j.cortex.2023.11.015

Preview

PDF - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (607kB) | Preview

Abstract

Neuroimaging studies consistently show advanced brain age in schizophrenia, suggesting that brain structure is often ‘older’ than expected at a given chronological age. Whether advanced brain age is linked to genetic liability for schizophrenia remains unclear. In this pre-registered secondary data analysis, we utilised a recall-by-genotype approach applied to a population-based subsample from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children to assess brain age differences between young adults aged 21–24 years with relatively high (n = 96) and low (n = 93) polygenic risk for schizophrenia (SCZ-PRS). A global index of brain age (or brain-predicted age) was estimated using a publicly available machine learning model previously trained on a combination of region-wise gray-matter measures, including cortical thickness, surface area and subcortical volumes derived from T1-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans. We found no difference in mean brain-PAD (the difference between brain-predicted age and chronological age) between the high- and low-SCZ-PRS groups, controlling for the effects of sex and age at time of scanning (b = −.21; 95% CI −2.00, 1.58; p = .82; Cohen's d = −.034; partial R2 = .00029). These findings do not support an association between SCZ-PRS and brain-PAD based on global age-related structural brain patterns, suggesting that brain age may not be a vulnerability marker of common genetic risk for SCZ. Future studies with larger samples and multimodal brain age measures could further investigate global or localised effects of SCZ-PRS.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Medicine MRC Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics (CNGG)
Publisher:	Elsevier
ISSN:	0010-9452
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	4 December 2023
Date of Acceptance:	23 November 2023
Last Modified:	18 Jan 2024 11:45
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/164502

Actions (repository staff only)

Edit Item