Feinstein Institute researchers identify new genes associated with cognitive ability

Amelia Camurati
Todd Lencz (Photo courtesy of Feinstein Institute)

A team of researchers at the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research in Manhasset discovered dozens of new genetic variations associated with a person’s general cognitive ability.

Todd Lencz, senior author of the study and professor at the institute and the Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell, said the study was published Tuesday in Cell Reports and is the result of the efforts of an international team of 65 scientists led by Lencz.

“All humans are 99.9 percent identical, and that’s what makes us human, but it’s that .1 percent of difference that makes us all unique,” Lencz said. “Those little differences can have ultimately an effect on things we can see, like eye and hair color. In this case, what we’re doing is looking at cognitive ability.”

Lencz said the genome-wide association study used small blood samples from 100,000 participants, and researchers looked at millions of different genetic elements in the DNA and measured their brain function with neuropsychological tests.

Those data were later combined with genomes from 300,000 additional people who had been measured for the highest level of education attained, which Lencz said serves as an estimate for cognitive ability.

“Ultimately, what we were able to do is identify certain key biological targets that may, in the future, be possible to affect with medications that could help people with cognitive disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, schizophrenia, and any disease of the brain that affects cognitive ability,” Lencz said.

About a year ago, Lencz said he did a similar study but only had a pool of about 35,000 individuals. In the first study, only a handful of genes were detected as significant, but the second study found hundreds of genes that show a relationship between enhanced cognitive ability and a longer life.

“The brain is sufficiently complex, and biology is sufficiently complex,” Lencz said. “Each of these genetic effects in and of itself is of minuscule effect. You need to have a very large sample size in order to have the power to be able to detect these very small effects.”

For the first time, the study also found a correlation between enhanced cognitive ability and autoimmune disorders such as Celiac disease and rheumatoid arthritis.

“We don’t really understand at this point how it even works, but it gives us a whole new direction to study how the genetics of the brain and cognitive ability relate to autoimmune disorders,” Lencz said. “This opens up a new idea of what this could be telling us about the relation between brain function, cognitive ability and autoimmune disorders.”

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