Trajectories of brain health

17. December 2024

In or collaborative efforts to explore the long-term trajectories of brain health, we have contributed to two recent high-impact papers emerging from the Lifebrain Consortium. The first publication, by Roe et al. in Nature Communications, describes how structural brain change trajectories in healthy adults correlate over the lifespan with Alzheimer’s-related genetic variation and concurrent memory decline. This longitudinal perspective helps pinpoint exactly when and how genetic risk begins to manifest physically in the brain. The second study, spearheaded by long-standing LIGA collaborator Prof. Anders Fjell at University of Oslo and published in Nature Human Behavior, rigorously examines the often-debated relationship between sleep and neurodegeneration. Surprisingly, after extensive analysis across multiple large European cohorts, the research team found absolutely no phenotypic or genotypic evidence for a link between sleep duration and brain atrophy, redirecting scientific focus towards more causative biological pathways. The LIGA team contributed valuable genome-wide SNP genotyping data and analytic insights to both of these studies.