Any large genome-wide association study corrects for population structure, in addition to restricting the sample to subjects of caucasian ethnicity. This is for the most part a practical necessity since\u00a0mankind’s migration pattern across the globe has left its marks on our genome. Not correcting for these effects would lead to false-positive genetic associations. However, the topic of correcting for these population structure effects has for the most part not reached the field of neuroimaging.<\/p>\n
It has been shown in earlier work that head and brain morphology is markedly different between continental genetic ancestries (paper<\/a>). In a recent work we are showing that one can predict continental ancestry even from resting-state functional MRI. We have not established yet the reason for why this works, but we hypothesize that artifacts from head and brain morphology influence the observed connectivity pattern (paper<\/a>). This\u00a0highlights that neuroimaging data is susceptible to differences between genetic ancestries, i.e., population structure.<\/p>\n Do we need adjustment for population structure in neuroimaging? Yes, I think we should be more mindful about these effects and consider including genetic ancestry as covariates in imaging studies. The very same way we are addressing other confounding variables.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Any large genome-wide association study corrects for population structure, in addition to restricting the sample to subjects of caucasian ethnicity. This is for the most part a practical necessity since\u00a0mankind’s migration pattern across the globe has left its marks on our genome. Not correcting for these effects would lead to false-positive genetic associations. However, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.altmann.eu\/research\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.altmann.eu\/research\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.altmann.eu\/research\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.altmann.eu\/research\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.altmann.eu\/research\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=435"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.altmann.eu\/research\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":436,"href":"http:\/\/www.altmann.eu\/research\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435\/revisions\/436"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.altmann.eu\/research\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.altmann.eu\/research\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.altmann.eu\/research\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}