Biology subjects

Staginnus, M.

Publications and source records attributed to Staginnus, M..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Epigenetic and brain age across development: Performance and associations in the MIND consortium

Understanding how biological age measures perform across development lays the groundwork for investigations into lifespan trajectories of healthy aging. We provide the most comprehensive assessment of epigenetic and brain age models across development (birth to 24 years; [≤]20,917 observations across 15 cohorts), evaluating how these models associate with chronological age and with each other, and how these associations change across development. Chronological age-prediction accuracy of epigenetic and brain age models was modest and varied substantially. Accuracy improved with age and stabilized by middle childhood. Few brain and fewer epigenetic clocks performed stably and well across all developmental stages. Performance was better when age range and tissue corresponded between training and testing data. Associations between epigenetic-brain age residuals were small, and changed little across development, tissues or clock generation. Given this developmentally dynamic system of epigenetic-brain age performances and associations, we give key recommendations to improve developmental research in this field.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2026

Brain Age in Conduct Disorder: A Mega-Analysis of the ENIGMA Antisocial Behavior Working Group

Conduct disorder (CD) is the leading global cause of mental health burden in children and adolescents and has recently been hypothesized to be a neurodevelopmental disorder. Although prior research has identified neuroanatomical differences associated with CD, it remains unclear whether these differences reflect atypical brain development. Here, we investigated the difference between an individuals brain age and chronological age as a proxy for variations in brain maturation. Using a pretrained model, we estimated brain age from structural neuroimaging data obtained from 1,119 youth with CD and 1,183 typically developing controls across 14 international cohorts participating in the ENIGMA-Antisocial Behavior Working Group. Youth with CD exhibited a statistically robust but small acceleration in brain age compared to typically developing youth (around 0.50 years), which was restricted to the adolescence-onset subtype of the disorder. Our large-scale, coordinated analysis provides the first evidence of accelerated neurodevelopment as a potential mechanism underlying CD.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2019

Sleep’s impact on emotional memory: A meta-analysis of whole-night, nap, and REM sleep effects

Numerous studies have shown that sleep enhances the consolidation of episodic memory. However, it remains unclear whether this consolidation benefit is moderated by the emotional valence of the learned material. To clarify whether sleep selectively enhances the consolidation of emotional material, we conducted a meta-analysis including N = 1,059 observations. Overall, our results do not support this hypothesis. When only studies with a sleep-group wake-group comparison were included in the analysis (k = 22), the retention advantage for emotional over neutral material was not significantly different between sleep and wake groups. When studies initially lacking a wake-control group were included in the analysis after statistical estimation of wake-group parameters, the retention advantage for emotional material was significantly larger in wake-groups than in sleep-groups (k = 34). Interestingly, however, an additional analysis of k = 8 studies investigating the selective effects of rapid-eye-movement sleep and slow-wave sleep on emotional memory consolidation provided evidence for a selective enhancement of emotional over neutral memory consolidation after rapid-eye-movement sleep compared to slow-wave sleep. These results suggest that sleep does not generally enhance emotional memory consolidation over neutral memory consolidation. However, specific sleep stages might preferentially enhance consolidation of emotional and neutral material, respectively.

neuroscience↗