Poster D76, Wednesday, August 21, 2019, 5:15 – 7:00 pm, Restaurant Hall
In search for intergenerational similarities in reading-related white matter tracts
Maaike Vandermosten1,2, Cheng Wang1, Klara Schevenels2, Maria Economou2, Fumiko Hoeft1,3;1brainLENS, Department of Psychiatry, UCSF, 2Experimental ORL, Department of Neuroscience, KU Leuven, 3Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Connecticut
Parents have large genetic and environmental influences on offspring’s cognition, behavior, and brain. These intergenerational effects are observed in the domain of literacy, including relationships between parents’ and offspring’s reading and phonological skills (van Bergen et al., 2014). In addition, at the neural level, intergenerational relationships have been observed between parental reading and a child’s early white matter (Vandermosten et al., 2017) and grey matter (Black et al.,2012) brain development. Yet, no study has thus far directly examined the intergenerational similarities between reading-related brain circuits. Given that a complex tasks such as reading relies on wide spread brain regions, we will focus on the intergenerational transfer of reading-related white matter tracts, which can capture this connectivity. More specifically, we examined parent-offspring association in the reading white matter network by means of diffusion MRI, focusing on two major reading-related white matter tracts, i.e. the dorsally running left Arcuate Fasciculus (AF) and the ventrally running left Inferior- Fronto-Occipital Fasciculus (IFOF). In addition, we investigated their right hemispheric homologues since lateralization for reading seems not clearly established in early readers. In a total of 35 healthy families, consisting of parents and their biological offspring, we analyzed the diffusion MRI (dMRI) data by means of diffusion tensor deterministic fibertracking. We found positive associations of fractional anisotropy in the ventral reading circuit between children and fathers (left IFOF: r=.561, p=.009; right IFOF: r=.458, p=.038) and between children and mothers (left IFOF: r=.435, p=.039; right IFOF: r=.560, p=.006). In contrast, no significant intergenerational correlations were observed for the dorsal reading circuit. In sum, these results show that the ventral reading tracts of offspring show similarities with both parents whereas the dorsal reading tracts provide no evidence intergenerational transmission. Stronger intergenerational correlations in the ventral relative to the dorsal reading circuit might imply that the impact from parents to offspring’s ventral tracts is more genetically mediated whereas it is more driven by environmental factors for the dorsal tracts. In a next step, we will now investigate how these intergenerational relationships in white matter are mediated by environmental and/or reading-related cognitive measures. At the long term, this type of research can provide insights in gene expression in the brain and clinical reading-related outcomes.
Themes: Reading, Disorders: Developmental
Method: White Matter Imaging (dMRI, DSI, DKI)