Partitioning variance in cortical morphometry into genetic, environmental, and subject-specific components.

The relative contributions of genetic variation and experience in shaping the morphology of the adolescent brain are not fully understood. Using longitudinal data from 11,665 subjects in the ABCD Study, we fit vertex-wise variance components including family effects, genetic effects, and subject-level effects using a computationally efficient framework. Variance in cortical thickness and surface area is largely attributable to genetic influence, whereas sulcal depth is primarily explained by subject-level effects. Our results identify areas with heterogeneous distributions of heritability estimates that have not been seen in previous work using data from cortical regions. We discuss the biological importance of subject-specific variance and its implications for environmental influences on cortical development and maturation.

Leveraging the adolescent brain cognitive development study to improve behavioral prediction from neuroimaging in smaller replication samples.

Neuroimaging is a popular method to map brain structural and functional patterns to complex human traits. Recently published observations cast doubt upon these prospects, particularly for prediction of cognitive traits from structural and resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). We leverage baseline data from thousands of children in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive DevelopmentSM Study to inform the replication sample size required with univariate and multivariate methods across different imaging modalities to detect reproducible brain-behavior associations. We demonstrate that by applying multivariate methods to high-dimensional brain imaging data, we can capture lower dimensional patterns of structural and functional brain architecture that correlate robustly with cognitive phenotypes and are reproducible with only 41 individuals in the replication sample for working memory-related functional MRI, and ~ 100 subjects for structural and resting state MRI. Even with 100 random re-samplings of 100 subjects in discovery, prediction can be adequately powered with 66 subjects in replication for multivariate prediction of cognition with working memory task functional MRI. These results point to an important role for neuroimaging in translational neurodevelopmental research and showcase how findings in large samples can inform reproducible brain-behavior associations in small sample sizes that are at the heart of many research programs and grants.

FEMA: Fast and efficient mixed-effects algorithm for large sample whole-brain imaging data.

The linear mixed-effects model (LME) is a versatile approach to account for dependence among observations. Many large-scale neuroimaging datasets with complex designs have increased the need for LME; however LME has seldom been used in whole-brain imaging analyses due to its heavy computational requirements. In this paper, we introduce a fast and efficient mixed-effects algorithm (FEMA) that makes whole-brain vertex-wise, voxel-wise, and connectome-wide LME analyses in large samples possible. We validate FEMA with extensive simulations, showing that the estimates of the fixed effects are equivalent to standard maximum likelihood estimates but obtained with orders of magnitude improvement in computational speed. We demonstrate the applicability of FEMA by studying the cross-sectional and longitudinal effects of age on region-of-interest level and vertex-wise cortical thickness, as well as connectome-wide functional connectivity values derived from resting state functional MRI, using longitudinal imaging data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive DevelopmentSM Study release 4.0. Our analyses reveal distinct spatial patterns for the annualized changes in vertex-wise cortical thickness and connectome-wide connectivity values in early adolescence, highlighting a critical time of brain maturation. The simulations and application to real data show that FEMA enables advanced investigation of the relationships between large numbers of neuroimaging metrics and variables of interest while considering complex study designs, including repeated measures and family structures, in a fast and efficient manner. The source code for FEMA is available via: https://github.com/cmig-research-group/cmig_tools/.

Brain-age prediction: Systematic evaluation of site effects, and sample age range and size.

Structural neuroimaging data have been used to compute an estimate of the biological age of the brain (brain-age) which has been associated with other biologically and behaviorally meaningful measures of brain development and aging. The ongoing research interest in brain-age has highlighted the need for robust and publicly available brain-age models pre-trained on data from large samples of healthy individuals. To address this need we have previously released a developmental brain-age model. Here we expand this work to develop, empirically validate, and disseminate a pre-trained brain-age model to cover most of the human lifespan. To achieve this, we selected the best-performing model after systematically examining the impact of seven site harmonization strategies, age range, and sample size on brain-age prediction in a discovery sample of brain morphometric measures from 35,683 healthy individuals (age range: 5-90 years; 53.59% female). The pre-trained models were tested for cross-dataset generalizability in an independent sample comprising 2101 healthy individuals (age range: 8-80 years; 55.35% female) and for longitudinal consistency in a further sample comprising 377 healthy individuals (age range: 9-25 years; 49.87% female). This empirical examination yielded the following findings: (1) the accuracy of age prediction from morphometry data was higher when no site harmonization was applied; (2) dividing the discovery sample into two age-bins (5-40 and 40-90 years) provided a better balance between model accuracy and explained age variance than other alternatives; (3) model accuracy for brain-age prediction plateaued at a sample size exceeding 1600 participants. These findings have been incorporated into CentileBrain (https://centilebrain.org/#/brainAGE2), an open-science, web-based platform for individualized neuroimaging metrics.

Task fMRI paradigms may capture more behaviorally relevant information than resting-state functional connectivity.

Characterizing the optimal fMRI paradigms for detecting behaviorally relevant functional connectivity (FC) patterns is a critical step to furthering our knowledge of the neural basis of behavior. Previous studies suggested that FC patterns derived from task fMRI paradigms, which we refer to as task-based FC, are better correlated with individual differences in behavior than resting-state FC, but the consistency and generalizability of this advantage across task conditions was not fully explored. Using data from resting-state fMRI and three fMRI tasks from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study ® (ABCD), we tested whether the observed improvement in behavioral prediction power of task-based FC can be attributed to changes in brain activity induced by the task design. We decomposed the task fMRI time course of each task into the task model fit (the fitted time course of the task condition regressors from the single-subject general linear model) and the task model residuals, calculated their respective FC, and compared the behavioral prediction performance of these FC estimates to resting-state FC and the original task-based FC. The FC of the task model fit was better than the FC of the task model residual and resting-state FC at predicting a measure of general cognitive ability or two measures of performance on the fMRI tasks. The superior behavioral prediction performance of the FC of the task model fit was content-specific insofar as it was only observed for fMRI tasks that probed similar cognitive constructs to the predicted behavior of interest. To our surprise, the task model parameters, the beta estimates of the task condition regressors, were equally if not more predictive of behavioral differences than all FC measures. These results showed that the observed improvement of behavioral prediction afforded by task-based FC was largely driven by the FC patterns associated with the task design. Together with previous studies, our findings highlighted the importance of task design in eliciting behaviorally meaningful brain activation and FC patterns.

Intelligence Polygenic Score Is More Predictive of Crystallized Measures: Evidence From the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study.

Findings in adults have shown that crystallized measures of intelligence, which are more culturally sensitive than fluid intelligence measures, have greater heritability; however, these results have not been found in children. The present study used data from 8,518 participants between 9 and 11 years old from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study. We found that polygenic predictors of intelligence test performance (based on genome-wide association meta-analyses of data from 269,867 individuals) and of educational attainment (based on data from 1.1 million individuals) predicted neurocognitive performance. We found that crystallized measures were more strongly associated with both polygenic predictors than were fluid measures. This mirrored heritability differences reported previously in adults and suggests similar associations in children. This may be consistent with a prominent role of gene-environment correlation in cognitive development measured by crystallized intelligence tests. Environmental and experiential mediators may represent malleable targets for improving cognitive outcomes.

Heritability Estimation of Cognitive Phenotypes in the ABCD Study® Using Mixed Models.

Twin and family studies have historically aimed to partition phenotypic variance into components corresponding to additive genetic effects (A), common environment (C), and unique environment (E). Here we present the ACE Model and several extensions in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development℠ Study (ABCD Study®), employed using the new Fast Efficient Mixed Effects Analysis (FEMA) package. In the twin sub-sample (n = 924; 462 twin pairs), heritability estimates were similar to those reported by prior studies for height (twin heritability = 0.86) and cognition (twin heritability between 0.00 and 0.61), respectively. Incorporating SNP-derived genetic relatedness and using the full ABCD Study® sample (n = 9,742) led to narrower confidence intervals for all parameter estimates. By leveraging the sparse clustering method used by FEMA to handle genetic relatedness only for participants within families, we were able to take advantage of the diverse distribution of genetic relatedness within the ABCD Study® sample.

Nucleus accumbens cytoarchitecture predicts weight gain in children.

The prevalence of obesity in children and adolescents worldwide has quadrupled since 1975 and is a key predictor of obesity later in life. Previous work has consistently observed relationships between macroscale measures of reward-related brain regions (e.g., the nucleus accumbens [NAcc]) and unhealthy eating behaviors and outcomes; however, the mechanisms underlying these associations remain unclear. Recent work has highlighted a potential role of neuroinflammation in the NAcc in animal models of diet-induced obesity. Here, we leverage a diffusion MRI technique, restriction spectrum imaging, to probe the microstructure (cellular density) of subcortical brain regions. More specifically, we test the hypothesis that the cell density of reward-related regions is associated with obesity-related metrics and early weight gain. In a large cohort of nine- and ten-year-olds enrolled in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study, we demonstrate that cellular density in the NAcc is related to individual differences in waist circumference at baseline and is predictive of increases in waist circumference after 1 y. These findings suggest a neurobiological mechanism for pediatric obesity consistent with rodent work showing that high saturated fat diets increase gliosis and neuroinflammation in reward-related brain regions, which in turn lead to further unhealthy eating and obesity.

Generalization of cortical MOSTest genome-wide associations within and across samples.

Genome-Wide Association studies have typically been limited to univariate analysis in which a single outcome measure is tested against millions of variants. Recent work demonstrates that a Multivariate Omnibus Statistic Test (MOSTest) is well powered to discover genomic effects distributed across multiple phenotypes. Applied to cortical brain MRI morphology measures, MOSTest has resulted in a drastic improvement in power to discover loci when compared to established approaches (min-P). One question that arises is how well these discovered loci replicate in independent data. Here we perform 10 times cross validation within 34,973 individuals from UK Biobank for imaging measures of cortical area, thickness and sulcal depth (>1,000 dimensionality for each). By deploying a replication method that aggregates discovered effects distributed across multiple phenotypes, termed PolyVertex Score (MOSTest-PVS), we demonstrate a higher replication yield and comparable replication rate of discovered loci for MOSTest (# replicated loci: 242-496, replication rate: 96-97%) in independent data when compared with the established min-P approach (# replicated loci: 26-55, replication rate: 91-93%). An out-of-sample replication of discovered loci was conducted with a sample of 4,069 individuals from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development® (ABCD) study, who are on average 50 years younger than UK Biobank individuals. We observe a higher replication yield and comparable replication rate of MOSTest-PVS compared to min-P. This finding underscores the importance of using well-powered multivariate techniques for both discovery and replication of high dimensional phenotypes in Genome-Wide Association studies.

Unique prediction of developmental psychopathology from genetic and familial risk.

BACKGROUND: Early detection is critical for easing the rising burden of psychiatric disorders. However, the specificity of psychopathological measurements and genetic predictors is unclear among youth. METHODS: We measured associations between genetic risk for psychopathology (polygenic risk scores (PRS) and family history (FH) measures) and a wide range of behavioral measures in a large sample (n = 5,204) of early adolescent participants (9-11 years) from the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development StudySM . Associations were measured both with and without accounting for shared variance across measures of genetic risk. RESULTS: When controlling for genetic risk for other psychiatric disorders, polygenic risk for problematic opioid use (POU) is uniquely associated with lower behavioral inhibition. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), depression (DEP), and attempted suicide (SUIC) PRS shared many significant associations with externalizing, internalizing, and psychosis-related behaviors. However, when accounting for all measures of genetic and familial risk, these PRS also showed clear, unique patterns of association. Polygenic risk for ASD, BIP, and SCZ, and attempted suicide uniquely predicted variability in cognitive performance. FH accounted for unique variability in behavior above and beyond PRS and vice versa, with FH measures explaining a greater proportion of unique variability compared to the PRS. CONCLUSION: Our results indicate that, among youth, many behaviors show shared genetic influences; however, there is also specificity in the profile of emerging psychopathologies for individuals with high genetic risk for particular disorders. This may be useful for quantifying early, differential risk for psychopathology in development.

Individual Differences in Cognitive Performance Are Better Predicted by Global Rather Than Localized BOLD Activity Patterns Across the Cortex.

Despite its central role in revealing the neurobiological mechanisms of behavior, neuroimaging research faces the challenge of producing reliable biomarkers for cognitive processes and clinical outcomes. Statistically significant brain regions, identified by mass univariate statistical models commonly used in neuroimaging studies, explain minimal phenotypic variation, limiting the translational utility of neuroimaging phenotypes. This is potentially due to the observation that behavioral traits are influenced by variations in neuroimaging phenotypes that are globally distributed across the cortex and are therefore not captured by thresholded, statistical parametric maps commonly reported in neuroimaging studies. Here, we developed a novel multivariate prediction method, the Bayesian polyvertex score, that turns a unthresholded statistical parametric map into a summary score that aggregates the many but small effects across the cortex for behavioral prediction. By explicitly assuming a globally distributed effect size pattern and operating on the mass univariate summary statistics, it was able to achieve higher out-of-sample variance explained than mass univariate and popular multivariate methods while still preserving the interpretability of a generative model. Our findings suggest that similar to the polygenicity observed in the field of genetics, the neural basis of complex behaviors may rest in the global patterning of effect size variation of neuroimaging phenotypes, rather than in localized, candidate brain regions and networks.

Meaningful associations in the adolescent brain cognitive development study.

The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study is the largest single-cohort prospective longitudinal study of neurodevelopment and children's health in the United States. A cohort of n = 11,880 children aged 9-10 years (and their parents/guardians) were recruited across 22 sites and are being followed with in-person visits on an annual basis for at least 10 years. The study approximates the US population on several key sociodemographic variables, including sex, race, ethnicity, household income, and parental education. Data collected include assessments of health, mental health, substance use, culture and environment and neurocognition, as well as geocoded exposures, structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and whole-genome genotyping. Here, we describe the ABCD Study aims and design, as well as issues surrounding estimation of meaningful associations using its data, including population inferences, hypothesis testing, power and precision, control of covariates, interpretation of associations, and recommended best practices for reproducible research, analytical procedures and reporting of results.

Vertex-wise multivariate genome-wide association study identifies 780 unique genetic loci associated with cortical morphology.

Brain morphology has been shown to be highly heritable, yet only a small portion of the heritability is explained by the genetic variants discovered so far. Here we extended the Multivariate Omnibus Statistical Test (MOSTest) and applied it to genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of vertex-wise structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) cortical measures from N=35,657 participants in the UK Biobank. We identified 695 loci for cortical surface area and 539 for cortical thickness, in total 780 unique genetic loci associated with cortical morphology robustly replicated in 8,060 children of mixed ethnicity from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study®. This reflects more than 8-fold increase in genetic discovery at no cost to generalizability compared to the commonly used univariate GWAS methods applied to region of interest (ROI) data. Functional follow up including gene-based analyses implicated 10% of all protein-coding genes and pointed towards pathways involved in neurogenesis and cell differentiation. Power analysis indicated that applying the MOSTest to vertex-wise structural MRI data triples the effective sample size compared to conventional univariate GWAS approaches. The large boost in power obtained with the vertex-wise MOSTest together with pronounced replication rates and highlighted biologically meaningful pathways underscores the advantage of multivariate approaches in the context of highly distributed polygenic architecture of the human brain.

Analysis of structural brain asymmetries in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder in 39 datasets.

OBJECTIVE: Some studies have suggested alterations of structural brain asymmetry in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), but findings have been contradictory and based on small samples. Here, we performed the largest ever analysis of brain left-right asymmetry in ADHD, using 39 datasets of the ENIGMA consortium. METHODS: We analyzed asymmetry of subcortical and cerebral cortical structures in up to 1,933 people with ADHD and 1,829 unaffected controls. Asymmetry Indexes (AIs) were calculated per participant for each bilaterally paired measure, and linear mixed effects modeling was applied separately in children, adolescents, adults, and the total sample, to test exhaustively for potential associations of ADHD with structural brain asymmetries. RESULTS: There was no evidence for altered caudate nucleus asymmetry in ADHD, in contrast to prior literature. In children, there was less rightward asymmetry of the total hemispheric surface area compared to controls (t = 2.1, p = .04). Lower rightward asymmetry of medial orbitofrontal cortex surface area in ADHD (t = 2.7, p = .01) was similar to a recent finding for autism spectrum disorder. There were also some differences in cortical thickness asymmetry across age groups. In adults with ADHD, globus pallidus asymmetry was altered compared to those without ADHD. However, all effects were small (Cohen's d from -0.18 to 0.18) and would not survive study-wide correction for multiple testing. CONCLUSION: Prior studies of altered structural brain asymmetry in ADHD were likely underpowered to detect the small effects reported here. Altered structural asymmetry is unlikely to provide a useful biomarker for ADHD, but may provide neurobiological insights into the trait.

Maturational trajectories of white matter microstructure underlying the right presupplementary motor area reflect individual improvements in motor response cancellation in children and adolescents.

The ability to effectively suppress motor response tendencies is essential for focused and goal-directed behavior. Here, we tested the hypothesis that developmental improvement in the ability to cancel a motor response is reflected by maturational changes in the white matter underlying the right presupplementary motor area (preSMA) and posterior inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), two cortical key areas of the fronto-basal ganglia "stopping" network. Eighty-eight typically-developing children and adolescents, aged 7-19 years, were longitudinally assessed with the stop-signal task (SST) and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) of the brain over a period of six years. Participants were examined from two to nine times with an average of 6.6 times, resulting in 576 SST-DTI datasets. We applied tract-based spatial statistics to extract mean fractional anisotropy (FA) from regions-of-interest in the white matter underlying the right IFG (IFGFA) and right preSMA (preSMAFA) at each time point. Motor response cancelation performance, estimated with the stop-signal reaction time (SSRT), improved with age. Initially well performing children plateaued around the age of 11 years, while initially poor performers caught up at the age of 13-14 years. White matter microstructure continued to mature across the investigated age range. Males generally displayed linear maturational trajectories, while females displayed more curvilinear trajectories that leveled off around 12-14 years of age. Maturational increases in right preSMAFA but not right IFGFA were associated with developmental improvements in SSRT. This association differed depending on the mean right preSMAFA across the individual maturational trajectory. Children with lower mean right preSMAFA exhibited poorer SSRT performance at younger ages but steeper developmental trajectories of SSRT improvement. Children with higher mean right preSMAFA exhibited flatter trajectories of SSRT improvement along with faster SSRT already at the first assessments. The results suggest that no further improvement in motor response cancellation is achieved once a certain level of maturity in the white matter underlying the right preSMA is reached. Similar dynamics may apply to other behavioral read-outs and brain structures and, thus, need to be considered in longitudinal MRI studies designed to map brain structural correlates of behavioral changes during development.

Beyond heritability: improving discoverability in imaging genetics.

Structural neuroimaging measures based on magnetic resonance imaging have been at the forefront of imaging genetics. Global efforts to ensure homogeneity of measurements across study sites have enabled large-scale imaging genetic projects, accumulating nearly 50K samples for genome-wide association studies (GWAS). However, not many novel genetic variants have been identified by these GWAS, despite the high heritability of structural neuroimaging measures. Here, we discuss the limitations of using heritability as a guidance for assessing statistical power of GWAS, and highlight the importance of discoverability-which is the power to detect genetic variants for a given phenotype depending on its unique genomic architecture and GWAS sample size. Further, we present newly developed methods that boost genetic discovery in imaging genetics. By redefining imaging measures independent of traditional anatomical conventions, it is possible to improve discoverability, enabling identification of more genetic effects. Moreover, by leveraging enrichment priors from genomic annotations and independent GWAS of pleiotropic traits, we can better characterize effect size distributions, and identify reliable and replicable loci associated with structural neuroimaging measures. Statistical tools leveraging novel insights into the genetic discoverability of human traits, promises to accelerate the identification of genetic underpinnings underlying brain structural variation.

Individual differences in frontolimbic circuitry and anxiety emerge with adolescent changes in endocannabinoid signaling across species.

Anxiety disorders peak in incidence during adolescence, a developmental window that is marked by dynamic changes in gene expression, endocannabinoid signaling, and frontolimbic circuitry. We tested whether genetic alterations in endocannabinoid signaling related to a common polymorphism in fatty acid amide hydrolase (FAAH), which alters endocannabinoid anandamide (AEA) levels, would impact the development of frontolimbic circuitry implicated in anxiety disorders. In a pediatric imaging sample of over 1,000 3- to 21-y-olds, we show effects of the FAAH genotype specific to frontolimbic connectivity that emerge by ∼12 y of age and are paralleled by changes in anxiety-related behavior. Using a knock-in mouse model of the FAAH polymorphism that controls for genetic and environmental backgrounds, we confirm phenotypic differences in frontoamygdala circuitry and anxiety-related behavior by postnatal day 45 (P45), when AEA levels begin to decrease, and also, at P75 but not before. These results, which converge across species and level of analysis, highlight the importance of underlying developmental neurobiology in the emergence of genetic effects on brain circuitry and function. Moreover, the results have important implications for the identification of risk for disease and precise targeting of treatments to the biological state of the developing brain as a function of developmental changes in gene expression and neural circuit maturation.

Conservation of Distinct Genetically-Mediated Human Cortical Pattern.

The many subcomponents of the human cortex are known to follow an anatomical pattern and functional relationship that appears to be highly conserved between individuals. This suggests that this pattern and the relationship among cortical regions are important for cortical function and likely shaped by genetic factors, although the degree to which genetic factors contribute to this pattern is unknown. We assessed the genetic relationships among 12 cortical surface areas using brain images and genotype information on 2,364 unrelated individuals, brain images on 466 twin pairs, and transcriptome data on 6 postmortem brains in order to determine whether a consistent and biologically meaningful pattern could be identified from these very different data sets. We find that the patterns revealed by each data set are highly consistent (p<10-3), and are biologically meaningful on several fronts. For example, close genetic relationships are seen in cortical regions within the same lobes and, the frontal lobe, a region showing great evolutionary expansion and functional complexity, has the most distant genetic relationship with other lobes. The frontal lobe also exhibits the most distinct expression pattern relative to the other regions, implicating a number of genes with known functions mediating immune and related processes. Our analyses reflect one of the first attempts to provide an assessment of the biological consistency of a genetic phenomenon involving the brain that leverages very different types of data, and therefore is not just statistical replication which purposefully use very similar data sets.

Abnormal Morphology of Select Cortical and Subcortical Regions in Neurofibromatosis Type 1.

Purpose To evaluate whether patients with neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1)-a multisystem neurodevelopmental disorder with myriad imaging manifestations, including focal transient myelin vacuolization within the deep gray nuclei, brainstem, and cerebellum-exhibit differences in cortical and subcortical structures, particularly in subcortical regions where these abnormalities manifest. Materials and Methods In this retrospective study, by using clinically obtained three-dimensional T1-weighted MR images and established image analysis methods, 10 intracranial volume-corrected subcortical and 34 cortical regions of interest (ROIs) were quantitatively assessed in 32 patients with NF1 and 245 age- and sex-matched healthy control subjects. By using linear models, ROI cortical thicknesses and volumes were compared between patients with NF1 and control subjects, as a function of age. With hierarchic cluster analysis and partial correlations, differences in the pattern of association between cortical and subcortical ROI volumes in patients with NF1 and control subjects were also evaluated. Results Patients with NF1 exhibited larger subcortical volumes and thicker cortices of select regions, particularly the hippocampi, amygdalae, cerebellar white matter, ventral diencephalon, thalami, and occipital cortices. For the thalami and pallida and 22 cortical ROIs in patients with NF1, a significant inverse association between volume and age was found, suggesting that volumes decrease with increasing age. Moreover, compared with those in control subjects, ROIs in patients with NF1 exhibited a distinct pattern of clustering and partial correlations. Discussion Neurofibromatosis type 1 is characterized by larger subcortical volumes and thicker cortices of select structures. Most apparent within the hippocampi, amygdalae, cerebellar white matter, ventral diencephalon, thalami and occipital cortices, these neurofibromatosis type 1-associated volumetric changes may, in part, be age dependent. © RSNA, 2018 Online supplemental material is available for this article.

Adolescent Development of Cortical and White Matter Structure in the NCANDA Sample: Role of Sex, Ethnicity, Puberty, and Alcohol Drinking.

Brain structural development continues throughout adolescence, when experimentation with alcohol is often initiated. To parse contributions from biological and environmental factors on neurodevelopment, this study used baseline National Consortium on Alcohol and NeuroDevelopment in Adolescence (NCANDA) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data, acquired in 674 adolescents meeting no/low alcohol or drug use criteria and 134 adolescents exceeding criteria. Spatial integrity of images across the 5 recruitment sites was assured by morphological scaling using Alzheimer's disease neuroimaging initiative phantom-derived volume scalar metrics. Clinical MRI readings identified structural anomalies in 11.4%. Cortical volume and thickness were smaller and white matter volumes were larger in older than in younger adolescents. Effects of sex (male > female) and ethnicity (majority > minority) were significant for volume and surface but minimal for cortical thickness. Adjusting volume and area for supratentorial volume attenuated or removed sex and ethnicity effects. That cortical thickness showed age-related decline and was unrelated to supratentorial volume is consistent with the radial unit hypothesis, suggesting a universal neural development characteristic robust to sex and ethnicity. Comparison of NCANDA with PING data revealed similar but flatter, age-related declines in cortical volumes and thickness. Smaller, thinner frontal, and temporal cortices in the exceeds-criteria than no/low-drinking group suggested untoward effects of excessive alcohol consumption on brain structural development.