학술논문
Educational attainment polygenic scores are associated with cortical total surface area and regions important for language and memory
Document Type
article
Author
Source
NeuroImage, Vol 212, Iss , Pp 116691- (2020)
Subject
Language
English
ISSN
1095-9572
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 detect small associations. This study investigates the association between three global (total surface area (TSA), intra-cranial volume (ICV) and average cortical thickness) and 34 regional cortical measures with educational attainment using a polygenic scoring (PGS) approach. Analyses were conducted on two independent target samples of young twin adults with neuroimaging data, from Australia (N = 1097) and the USA (N = 723), and found that higher EA-PGS were significantly associated with larger global brain size measures, ICV and TSA (R2 = 0.006 and 0.016 respectively, p