Birth weight is associated with brain tissue volumes seven decades later but not with MRI markers of brain ageing

Wheater, Emily; Shenkin, Susan D.; Maniega, Susana Muñoz; Hernández, Maria C. Valdés; Wardlaw, Joanna M.; Deary, Ian J.; Boardman, James P.; Cox, Simon R.

doi:10.1016/j.nicl.2021.102776

Cited by 24 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 69 publications

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“…Low birth weight relative to birth length has been shown to be associated with lower brain volumes at 75 as well as reduced processing speed and executive function ( Muller et al, 2014 ). A recent study among elderly in their early seventies demonstrated that birth weight was positively associated with total brain volume and regional cortical surface area amongst others, which could be explained by larger intracranial volume, rather than by age-related tissue atrophy ( Wheater et al, 2021 ).…”

Section: Early Life Factors and Markers Of Brain Reservementioning

confidence: 99%

Are Brain and Cognitive Reserve Shaped by Early Life Circumstances?

Rooij

2022

Front. Neurosci.

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When growing older, many people are faced with cognitive deterioration, which may even amount to a form of dementia at some point in time. Although neuropathological signs of dementia disorders can often be demonstrated in brains of patients, the degree to which clinical symptoms are present does mostly not accurately reflect the amount of neuropathology that is present. Sometimes existent pathology even goes without any obvious clinical presentation. An explanation for this phenomenon may be found in the concept of reserve capacity. Reserve capacity refers to the ability of the brain to effectively buffer changes that are associated with normal aging processes and to cope with pathological damage. A larger reserve capacity has been suggested to increase resilience against age-associated cognitive deterioration and dementia disorders. Traditionally, a division has been made between brain reserve, which is based on morphological characteristics of the brain, and cognitive reserve, which is based on functional characteristics of the brain. The present review discusses the premises that brain and cognitive reserve capacity are shaped by prenatal and early postnatal factors. Evidence is accumulating that circumstances during the first 1,000 days of life are of the utmost importance for the lifelong health of an individual. Cognitive deterioration and dementia disorders may also have their origin in early life and a potentially important pathway by which the early environment affects the risk for neurodegenerative diseases is by developmental programming of the reserve capacity of the brain. The basic idea behind developmental programming of brain and cognitive reserve is explained and an overview of studies that support this idea is presented. The review is concluded by a discussion of potential mechanisms, synthesis of the evidence and relevance and future directions in the field of developmental origins of reserve capacity.

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Section: Early Life Factors and Markers Of Brain Reservementioning

confidence: 99%

Are Brain and Cognitive Reserve Shaped by Early Life Circumstances?

Rooij

2022

Front. Neurosci.

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“…It is made available under a preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in The copyright holder for this this version posted December 2, 2022. ; https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.12.02.514196 doi: bioRxiv preprint birthweights. Given previous findings of broad effects of BW on cortical area and volume (5,6,16), we did not expect effects to be localized. Rather, we expected BW to affect gross head and brain size irrespective of sex, but we also performed supplementary analyses controlling for intracranial volume (ICV) in order to check for possible specificity of effects.…”

Section: Samplesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Finally, models were rerun only including participants with birth weights between 2.5 and 5.0 kg, to assess whether relationships were upheld also when excluding low and high birthweights. Given previous findings of broad effects of BW on cortical area and volume (5,6,16), we did not expect effects to be localized. Rather, we expected BW to affect gross head and brain size irrespective of sex, but we also performed supplementary analyses controlling for intracranial volume (ICV) in order to check for possible specificity of effects.…”

Section: Samplesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…BW reflects fetal and maternal genetic, but also other in utero environmental factors affecting fetal growth (11, 12), including brain growth (6, 13-15). By now, a series of studies have established that BW relates positively to mental health, cognitive function and brain characteristics, including neuroanatomical volumes and cortical surface area as measured in different age groups (4-6, 13, 16, 17). However, it is unknown whether and how BW relates to brain characteristics through the lifespan, how consistent effects are within and across samples, whether BW is associated with lifespan brain changes, and to what extent lifespan effects of BW on the brain are of an environmental, rather than genetic nature.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Back to the future: omnipresence of fetal influence on the human brain through the lifespan

Walhovd

Krogsrud

Amlien

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Human fetal development has been associated with brain health at later stages. It is unknown whether and how consistently growth in utero, as indexed by birth weight (BW), relates to lifespan brain characteristics and changes, and to what extent these influences are of a genetic and/or environmental nature. We hypothesized that associations of BW and structural brain characteristics persist through the lifespan, with topographically consistent effects across samples of varying age and origin, that BW is not protective against atrophy in aging, and that effects are partly environmental. The associations of BW and cortical area, thickness, volume and their change were investigated vertex-wise in developmental (ABCD), older adult and aging (UKB) and lifespan (LCBC) longitudinal samples. In total, 5794 persons (4-82 years, w/ 386 monozygotic twins), were followed for up to 8.3 years, yielding 12,088 brain MRIs. Positive associations between BW and cortical surface area and volume were remarkably stable through the lifespan, within and across samples of different origin, with spatial correlations in the range r = .51- .79. In contrast, there was modest and no consistent effect of BW on brain changes. Effects of BW discordance in the monozygotic twin subsample indicated the effects were partly environmental. In conclusion, the influence of prenatal growth on cortical topography is stable through the lifespan, and is reliably seen in development, adulthood, and aging. These findings support early life influence on the brain through the lifespan according to a threshold model of brain reserve, rather than a maintenance model.

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“…Cerebrospinal fluid, grey matter, white matter, and white matter hyperintensities were segmented using FreeSurfer (Fischl, 2012), FSL-FAST (Zhang et al, 2001), and a semi-automated multi-spectral fusion method, which capitalised on multimodal information provided by T2-w, T1-w, T2*-w and FLAIR MRI sequences (Valdés Hernández et al, 2010;Wardlaw et al, 2011;Wheater et al, 2021). The normal-appearing white matter was defined as regions of the white matter where no white matter hyperintensity was identified.…”

Section: Segmentation Of Regions Of Interest In the Study Of Referencementioning

confidence: 99%

Assessment of PVS Filtering Methods Using a Three-Dimensional Computational Model

Bernal¹,

Valdés-Hernández²,

Escudero³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Growing interest surrounds the assessment of perivascular spaces (PVS) on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and their validation as a clinical biomarker of adverse brain health. Nonetheless, the limits of validity of current state-of-the-art segmentation methods are still unclear. Here, we propose an open-source three-dimensional computational framework comprising 3D digital reference objects and evaluate the performance of three PVS filtering methods under various spatiotemporal imaging considerations (including sampling, motion artefacts, and Rician noise). Specifically, we study the performance of the Frangi, Jerman and RORPO filters in enhancing PVS-like structures to facilitate segmentation. Our findings were three-fold. First, as long as voxels are isotropic, RORPO outperforms the other two filters, regardless of imaging quality. Unlike the Frangi and Jerman filters, RORPO’s performance does not deteriorate as PVS volume increases. Second, the performance of all “vesselness” filters is heavily influenced by imaging quality, with sampling and motion artefacts being the most damaging for these types of analyses. Third, none of the filters can distinguish PVS from other hyperintense structures (e.g. white matter hyperintensities, stroke lesions, or lacunes) effectively, the area under precision-recall curve dropped substantially (Frangi: from 94.21 [IQR 91.60, 96.16] to 43.76 [IQR 25.19, 63.38]; Jerman: from 94.51 [IQR 91.90, 95.37] to 58.00 [IQR 35.68, 64.87]; RORPO: from 98.72 [IQR 95.37, 98.96] to 71.87 [IQR 57.21, 76.63] without and with other hyperintense structures, respectively). The use of our computational model enables comparing segmentation methods and identifying their advantages and disadvantages, thereby providing means for testing and optimising pipelines for ongoing and future studies.

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Birth weight is associated with brain tissue volumes seven decades later but not with MRI markers of brain ageing

Cited by 24 publications

References 69 publications

Are Brain and Cognitive Reserve Shaped by Early Life Circumstances?

Are Brain and Cognitive Reserve Shaped by Early Life Circumstances?

Back to the future: omnipresence of fetal influence on the human brain through the lifespan

Assessment of PVS Filtering Methods Using a Three-Dimensional Computational Model

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