Fudan University found that adolescent brain structural abnormalities are significantly associated with mental illness risk

Author: Huang Xin Xin month side Date: 2019-01-18

Does adolescent brain development abnormalities bury the "seeds" of schizophrenia in adulthood, how to discover this hidden seed? The team of Feng Jianfeng from the Institute of Brain Intelligence Science and Technology of Fudan University calculated and analyzed more than 10,000 imaging genetic data from more than 20 research institutions in 6 countries including the United Kingdom and the United States, and studied through the whole brain genome-wide "wide search". It is found that the genetic locus most related to the volume of the brain crust nucleus in adolescence is also a risk site for schizophrenia.

In the early morning of January 17 (Beijing time), the research results were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Psychiatry.

There has been a hypothesis about neurodevelopmental disorders in schizophrenia. In the process of synaptic pruning in the adolescence and early adulthood, the genetic and environmental causes of neurological deficits are exposed, leading to an increased risk of mental symptoms in adulthood.

"This study demonstrates that adolescent brain shell nuclear volume abnormalities are highly correlated with the risk of schizophrenia." Professor Feng Jianfeng said that the discovery is expected to help scientists reveal the pathogenesis of schizophrenia and provide new ideas for advanced intervention studies before the onset of clinical symptoms. .

The prevention and treatment of mental illness is a common problem faced by all countries in the world today. According to reports, mental illness in China has exceeded cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases and malignant tumors, becoming the biggest burden of the medical system. However, research on the pathogenesis of mental illness has been slow on a global scale. Previously, research has accumulated more than 20,000 brain imaging and genetic data worldwide, and no genetic disease risk loci associated with brain structure has been found.

"The difficulty of this research is that the brain is affected by different genetic information at different ages. Previous studies have not strictly controlled this confounding factor, leading to the inundation of important genetic signals." The first author of the paper, Fudan University brain intelligence science and Luo Qiang, a deputy researcher at the Institute of Technology, said in an interview with the Journal of the Chinese Academy of Sciences that after three years of focused research, the brain structure image of 14-year-old healthy adolescents was selected and the traditional anatomy was broken. Learning brain area division restrictions, unbiased exploratory research in the whole brain genome, the first significant correlation between brain structure and genetic loci in adolescents was found.

At the same time, the researchers further conducted a Mendelian randomized analysis and found a new pathway for gene-brain-schizophrenia: the risk allele of the rs13107325 single nucleotide polymorphism of the zinc transporter SLC39A8 gene Genes interfere with the normal development of the cerebral nucleus of the adolescent, which in turn increases the risk of schizophrenia in adulthood.

It is reported that another problem faced by this research is that the whole brain voxel-whole genome association analysis method used by the research team has increased the related calculation amount to 40,000 times before, which poses a great challenge to the computing power. In response to this problem, the researchers improved the computational efficiency by tens of thousands of times through algorithmic improvements and completed 16 million correlation analyses in less than 100 hours.

“The breakthrough in this research is based on the computational analysis of multi-center image genetic data from around the world. These full-scale standardized big data acquisitions benefit from the international collaborative research we have conducted in the world for many years. Feng Jianfeng particularly emphasized.

It is reported that the Fudan University Brain Intelligence Science and Technology Research Institute led by Feng Jianfeng has in-depth cooperation with the world's largest brain data research institutions such as Biobank, HCP, ADNI, ABCD, etc., and is committed to integrating and constructing the world's largest Modal multiscale brain science database. With the use of computational neuroscience as a bridge, the use of brain intelligence methods such as development pattern recognition and depth algorithms to carry out research on brain mechanisms, pathogenesis of brain diseases and other related fields.

Source: Science Network