Biology subjects

Moffitt, T. E.

Publications and source records attributed to Moffitt, T. E..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2018

Genetics & the Geography of Health, Behavior, and Attainment

Peoples life chances can be predicted by their neighborhoods. This observation is driving efforts to improve lives by changing neighborhoods. Some neighborhood effects may be causal, supporting neighborhood-level interventions. Other neighborhood effects may reflect selection of families with different characteristics into different neighborhoods, supporting interventions that target families/individuals directly. To test how selection affects different neighborhood-linked problems, we linked neighborhood data with genetic, health, and social-outcome data for >7,000 European-descent UK and US young people in the E-Risk and Add Health Studies. We tested selection/concentration of genetic risks for obesity, schizophrenia, teen-pregnancy, and poor educational outcomes in high-risk neighborhoods, including genetic analysis of neighborhood mobility. Findings argue against genetic selection/concentration as an explanation for neighborhood gradients in obesity and mental-health problems, suggesting neighborhoods may be causal. In contrast, modest genetic selection/concentration was evident for teen-pregnancy and poor educational outcomes, suggesting neighborhood effects for these outcomes should be interpreted with care.

genetics↗

bioRxiv2018

General Functional Connectivity: shared features of resting-state and task fMRI drive reliable individual differences in functional brain networks

Intrinsic connectivity, measured using resting-state fMRI, has emerged as a fundamental tool in the study of the human brain. However, due to practical limitations, many studies do not collect enough resting-state data to generate reliable measures of intrinsic connectivity necessary for studying individual differences. Here we present general functional connectivity (GFC) as a method for leveraging shared features across resting-state and task fMRI and demonstrate in the Human Connectome Project and the Dunedin Study that GFC offers better test-retest reliability than intrinsic connectivity estimated from the same amount of resting-state data alone. Furthermore, at equivalent scan lengths, GFC displays higher heritability on average than resting-state functional connectivity. We also show that predictions of cognitive ability from GFC generalize across datasets, performing as well or better than resting-state or task data alone. Collectively, our work suggests that GFC can improve the reliability of intrinsic connectivity estimates in existing datasets and, subsequently, the opportunity to identify meaningful correlates of individual differences in behavior. Given that task and resting-state data are often collected together, many researchers can immediately derive more reliable measures of intrinsic connectivity through the adoption of GFC rather than solely using resting-state data. Moreover, by better capturing heritable variation in intrinsic connectivity, GFC represents a novel endophenotype with broad applications in clinical neuroscience and biomarker discovery.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2018

A polygenic p factor for major psychiatric disorders

It has recently been proposed that a single dimension, called the p factor, can capture a persons liability to mental disorder. Relevant to the p hypothesis, recent genetic research has found surprisingly high genetic correlations between pairs of psychiatric disorders. Here, for the first time we compare genetic correlations from different methods and examine their support for a genetic p factor. We tested the hypothesis of a genetic p factor by using principal component analysis on matrices of genetic correlations between major psychiatric disorders estimated by three methods - family study, Genome-wide Complex Trait Analysis, and Linkage-Disequilibrium Score Regression - and on a matrix of polygenic score correlations constructed for each individual in a UK-representative sample of 7,026 unrelated individuals. All disorders loaded on a first unrotated principal component, which accounted for 57%, 43%, 34% and 19% of the variance respectively for each method. Our results showed that all four methods provided strong support for a genetic p factor that represents the pinnacle of the hierarchical genetic architecture of psychopathology.

genomics↗