Lee T, Thalamuthu A, Henry J D, Trollor J N, Ames D, Wright M J, Sachdev P S
Centre for Healthy Brain Ageing, School of Psychiatry, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
Neuropsychiatric Institute, Prince of Wales Hospital, Randwick, NSW, Australia.
Behav Genet. 2018 May;48(3):187-197. doi: 10.1007/s10519-018-9897-z. Epub 2018 Apr 4.
We used a sub-sample from the Older Australian Twins Study to estimate the heritability of performance on three tests of language ability: Boston Naming Test (BNT), Letter/Phonemic Fluency (FAS) and Category/Semantic Fluency (CFT) Tests. After adjusting for age, sex, education, mood, and global cognition (GC), heritability estimates obtained for the three tests were 0.35, 0.59, and 0.20, respectively. Multivariate analyses showed that the genetic correlation were high for BNT and CFT (0.61), but low for BNT and FAS (0.17), and for FAS and CFT (0.28). Genetic modelling with Cholesky decomposition indicated that the covariation between the three measures could be explained by a common genetic factor. Environmental correlations between the language ability measures were low, and there were considerable specific environmental influences for each measure. Future longitudinal studies with language performance and neuroimaging data can further our understanding of genetic and environmental factors involved in the process of cognitive aging.
我们使用了澳大利亚老年双胞胎研究的一个子样本，来估计三项语言能力测试的表现的遗传力：波士顿命名测试（BNT）、字母/音素流畅性测试（FAS）和类别/语义流畅性测试（CFT）。在对年龄、性别、教育程度、情绪和整体认知（GC）进行调整后，这三项测试获得的遗传力估计值分别为0.35、0.59和0.20。多变量分析表明，BNT和CFT的遗传相关性较高（0.61），但BNT和FAS的遗传相关性较低（0.17），FAS和CFT的遗传相关性也较低（0.28）。采用Cholesky分解的遗传建模表明，这三项测量之间的协变可以由一个共同的遗传因素来解释。语言能力测量之间的环境相关性较低，并且每项测量都存在相当大的特定环境影响。未来关于语言表现和神经影像学数据的纵向研究可以进一步加深我们对认知老化过程中涉及的遗传和环境因素的理解。
