USC Stevens Neuroimaging and Informatics Institute, Keck School of Medicine of University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, 90033, USA.
Molecular and Computational Biology Program, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, 90089, USA.
Sci Rep. 2020 Jan 30;10(1):10. doi: 10.1038/s41598-019-56089-4.
Brain age is a metric that quantifies the degree of aging of a brain based on whole-brain anatomical characteristics. While associations between individual human brain regions and environmental or genetic factors have been investigated, how brain age is associated with those factors remains unclear. We investigated these associations using UK Biobank data. We first trained a statistical model for obtaining relative brain age (RBA), a metric describing a subject's brain age relative to peers, based on whole-brain anatomical measurements, from training set subjects (n = 5,193). We then applied this model to evaluation set subjects (n = 12,115) and tested the association of RBA with tobacco smoking, alcohol consumption, and genetic variants. We found that daily or almost daily consumption of tobacco and alcohol were both significantly associated with increased RBA (P < 0.001). We also found SNPs significantly associated with RBA (p-value < 5E-8). The SNP most significantly associated with RBA is located in MAPT gene. Our results suggest that both environmental and genetic factors are associated with structural brain aging.
脑龄是一种基于全脑解剖特征来量化大脑衰老程度的指标。虽然已经研究了个体大脑区域与环境或遗传因素之间的关联,但脑龄与这些因素的关联尚不清楚。我们使用 UK Biobank 数据来研究这些关联。我们首先基于全脑解剖测量值,从训练集对象(n=5193)中训练了一个统计模型,以获得相对脑龄(RBA),这是一种描述对象的脑龄相对于同龄人的指标。然后,我们将该模型应用于评估集对象(n=12115),并测试 RBA 与吸烟、饮酒和遗传变异的关联。我们发现,每天或几乎每天吸烟和饮酒都与 RBA 的增加显著相关(P<0.001)。我们还发现了与 RBA 显著相关的 SNPs(p 值<5E-8)。与 RBA 最显著相关的 SNP 位于 MAPT 基因中。我们的结果表明,环境和遗传因素都与大脑结构的衰老有关。