Prenatal maternal stress from a natural disaster and hippocampal volumes: Gene-by-environment interactions in young adolescents
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Gene-by-environment interactions influence brain development from conception to adulthood. In particular, prenatal brain development is a window of vulnerability to the interplay between environmental and genetic factors. Rodent and human research demonstrates that prenatal maternal stress (PNMS) alters hippocampal volumes. In Project Ice Storm, it has been demonstrated that increased levels of objective, but not subjective, PNMS are associated with increased right hippocampal volumes in early adolescent females. However, although PNMS affects hippocampal size on average, similar degrees of PNMS lead to different effects in different individuals. This differential susceptibility to the effects of PNMS may be due to genetic variants; however, the role of genes in moderating the effect of PNMS on the hippocampus remains unknown. Therefore, we investigated the role of genetic variants known as single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). SNPs are differences in the DNA sequence that occur frequently across a population and confer phenotypic differences. Here we investigated six SNPs that are candidates to moderate the effects of PNMS on hippocampal volume: 5HT2A (rs6311), COMT (rs4680), CRHR1 (rs110402), GABRA6 (rs3219151), NR3C1 (rs41423247) and BDNF (rs6265). To investigate this, we assessed 53 subjects who were in utero during the January 1998 Quebec ice storm. The mothers had responded to questionnaires about their objective and subjective levels of stress from the ice storm in June 1998. When children were 11½ years old, T1-weighted structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans were obtained using a 3T scanner and analyzed to determine hippocampal volumes. We also collected and genotyped DNA from the children. Moderation analyses were conducted to determine whether any or all of the six SNPs moderate the effect of PNMS on hippocampal volumes. I found that objective PNMS was associated with right hippocampal volume and the BDNF and COMT genotypes were associated with left hippocampal volume. In addition, SNPs located on COMT, 5HT2A, CRHR1 and NR3C1 moderated the effect of PNMS on hippocampal volume. Thus, I conclude that an individual's genotype alters their susceptibility to the effects of PNMS.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".