Departments of Radiology and Psychiatry, Division of Neuroradiology, Brain Behavior Laboratory, Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, 3400 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
Developmental Neurogenomics Unit, Human Genetics Branch, National Institute of Mental Health, Building 10, Room 4D18, 10 Center Drive, Bethesda, MD, USA.
Cereb Cortex. 2019 Dec 17;29(11):4743-4752. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhz007.
The neural substrates of intelligence represent a fundamental but largely uncharted topic in human developmental neuroscience. Prior neuroimaging studies have identified modest but highly dynamic associations between intelligence and cortical thickness (CT) in childhood and adolescence. In a separate thread of research, quantitative genetic studies have repeatedly demonstrated that most measures of intelligence are highly heritable, as are many brain regions associated with intelligence. In the current study, we integrate these 2 streams of prior work by examining the genetic contributions to CT-intelligence relationships using a genetically informative longitudinal sample of 813 typically developing youth, imaged with high-resolution MRI and assessed with Wechsler Intelligence Scales (IQ). In addition to replicating the phenotypic association between multimodal association cortex and language centers with IQ, we find that CT-IQ covariance is nearly entirely genetically mediated. Moreover, shared genetic factors drive the rapidly evolving landscape of CT-IQ relationships in the developing brain.
智力的神经基础是人类发展神经科学中的一个基本但尚未被充分探索的课题。先前的神经影像学研究已经确定了智力与儿童和青少年时期皮质厚度（CT）之间存在适度但高度动态的关联。在另一项研究中，定量遗传学研究反复表明，大多数智力指标都具有高度的遗传性，与智力相关的许多大脑区域也是如此。在当前的研究中，我们通过使用具有遗传信息的 813 名典型发育青年的纵向样本，使用高分辨率 MRI 成像并进行韦氏智力测验（IQ）评估，综合了这两个先前研究的结果。除了复制多模态联合皮层和语言中枢与 IQ 之间的表型关联外，我们还发现 CT-IQ 协方差几乎完全由遗传介导。此外，共享的遗传因素驱动了发育中大脑 CT-IQ 关系的快速演变。
