Hoeft, F.
University of California San Francisco ( UCSF)
Parents have large influence on offspring?s brain and cognitive development. The intergenerational multiple deficit model affords integration of parental influences as well as others, whether genetic or environmental, and whether risk or protective factors, to explain individual differences in reading ability and liability for developing dyslexia, a specific reading disability. Further, it has recently been suggested that most complex traits show intergenerational sex-specific transmission patterns. Macrocircuits using imaging may be an ideal target for investigations of intergenerational effects, where key causes may converge in ways that lead to complex phenotypes such as reading and dyslexia.
Based on these notions, we are currently examining how parental cognitive and neuroimaging patterns are associated with offspring?s reading and related imaging patterns. We first establish the feasibility of this novel approach, intergenerational imaging, by confirming maternal transmission patterns in the cortico-limbic system that is well established in gene expression and behavioral studies of animals and humans (Yamagata et al. J Neurosci. in press). We then interrogate network patterns related to reading, and show intergenerational transmission patterns. We also show results indicating how paternal age may negatively predict reading outcome and the potential neural mechanism (e.g. visuo-spatial attention, thalamic development, de novo mutation). We discuss preliminary findings in light of historical causal theories of dyslexia. We also introduce our new research program that will allow us to dissociate genetic, prenatal and postnatal environmental influences, which has traditionally not been feasible in humans, but is critically important in dissecting neurobiological mechanisms underlying reading and dyslexia.