The Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor val66met Polymorphism and Variation in Human Cortical Morphology

By L. Pezawas, Beth A. Verchinski, Venkata S. Mattay, J. Callicott, Bhaskar S. Kolachana, R. Straub, Michael Egan, Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, Daniel R. Weinberger. Journal of Neuroscience, 2004

923 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A variation in the BDNF gene (val66met) affects the function of BDNF in neurons, predicts variation in human memory, and is associated with several neurological and psychiatric disorders. Here, we show that, in magnetic resonance imaging scans of a large sample of normal individuals, this polymorphism affects the anatomy of the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, identifying a genetic mechanism of variation in brain morphology related to learning and memory.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0a20b0dd235bfed0fe8b5bf3ad4ecbfcd3542703

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Citations in the corpus

Central effects of stress hormones in health and disease: Understanding the protective and damaging effects of stress and stress mediators. (2008, background): “Yet another example is the consequence of having the Val66Met allele of the BDNF gene on hippocampal volume, memory and mood disorders (Hariri et al., 2003; Pezawas et al., 2004; Jiang et al., 2005; Szeszko et al., 2005).”
Hierarchical Organization of Human Cortical Networks in Health and Schizophrenia (2008, methodology): “…image with a custom T1-weighted template image [based on a previous sample of 171 healthy volunteers scanned using the same system and sequence (Pezawas et al., 2004)]; modulation of the gray matter densities in the normalized images by the determinant of the Jacobian of the normalization…”
Persistence of long-term memory storage requires a late protein synthesis- and BDNF- dependent phase in the hippocampus. (2007, positive): “BDNF expression and activity have been shown to play a critical role in memory formation for a variety of learning tasks in different species, including humans (Egan et al., 2003; Hall et al., 2000; Johnston et al., 1999; Lee et al., 2004; Liu et al., 2004; Mizuno et al., 2000; Monteggia et al., 200”
Candidate mechanisms for chemotherapy-induced cognitive changes (2007, background): “The methionine allele has been associated with poorer performance on measures of memory and executive function and lower hippocampal volum”
Potential therapeutic uses of BDNF in neurological and psychiatric disorders (2011, background): “Val/Met heterozygotes also have reduced hippocampal volume compared to Val/Val homozygote”
Genetic influences on human brain structure: A review of brain imaging studies in twins (2007, background): “…Factor (BDNF)-gene (a gene involved in reducing the amount of naturally occurring neuronal cell death) were found to have a reduced size of the prefrontal cortex [Pezawas et al., 2004] and hippocampus compared to val/ val carriers [Bueller et al., 2006; Pezawas et al., 2004; Szeszko et al., 2005].”
Whole genome association study of brain-wide imaging phenotypes for identifying quantitative trait loci in MCI and AD: A study of the ADNI cohort (2010, background): “For example, whole brain studies usually focus on a small number of genetic variables (e.g., Ahmad et al., 2006; Brun et al., 2009; Filippinia et al., 2009; Nichols and Inkster, 2009; Pezawas et al., 2004; Shen et al., 2007), while whole genome studies typically examine a limited number of imaging v”