Heritability of cervical spinal cord structure

Area of Science:

• Neuroimaging
• Human Anatomy
• Genetics

Background:

• Spinal cord structure measurements serve as crucial phenotypes for disease monitoring.
• Understanding the heritability of spinal cord anatomy is essential for tracking neurodegenerative disorders.
• Previous research has not fully elucidated the genetic contributions to cervical spinal cord morphology.

Purpose of the Study:

• To measure the heritability of cervical spinal cord anatomy in healthy individuals.
• To investigate the correlations between spinal cord metrics and other physical and neurological measures.
• To establish the reliability and validity of MRI-based spinal cord measurements.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of twin data from the Human Connectome Project using semiautomated spinal cord segmentation.
• Evaluation of test-retest reliability and broad-sense heritability via an AE model.
• Assessment of relationships between spinal cord metrics, brain structure, and motor function.

Main Results:

• Cervical spinal cord cross-sectional area (CSA), left-right width (LRW), and anterior-posterior width (APW) demonstrated high heritability (85%-91%).
• Spinal cord measures strongly correlated with brain volume; CSA showed specific correlations with thalamic volume and occipital cortex area.
• Participant sex significantly impacted these anatomical metrics, and LRW correlated with height.

Conclusions:

• This study confirms a significant genetic influence on cervical spinal cord structure.
• Robust MRI metrics of spinal cord anatomy are reliable for monitoring normal development and neurodegenerative conditions.
• These findings support the use of spinal cord MRI phenotypes for conditions like spinal cord injury and Multiple Sclerosis (MS).