Cerebral small vessel disease genomics and its implications across the lifespan

Muralidharan Sargurupremraj, Hideaki Suzuki, Xueqiu Jian, Chloe Sarnowski, Tavia E. Evans, Joshua C. Bis, Gudny Eiriksdottir, Saori Sakaue, Natalie Terzikhan, Mohamad Habes, Wei Zhao, Nicola J. Armstrong, Edith Hofer, Lisa R. Yanek, Saskia P. Hagenaars, Rajan B. Kumar, Erik B. van den Akker, Rebekah E. McWhirter, Stella Trompet, Aniket MishraYasaman Saba, Claudia L. Satizabal, Gregory Beaudet, Laurent Petit, Ami Tsuchida, Laure Zago, Sabrina Schilling, Sigurdur Sigurdsson, Rebecca F. Gottesman, Cora E. Lewis, Neelum T. Aggarwal, Oscar L. Lopez, Jennifer A. Smith, Maria C. Valdes Hernandez, Jeroen van der Grond, Margaret J. Wright, Maria J. Knol, Marcus Dorr, Russell J. Thomson, et al.

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

112 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

White matter hyperintensities (WMH) are the most common brain-imaging feature of cerebral small vessel disease (SVD), hypertension being the main known risk factor. Here, we identify 27 genome-wide loci for WMH-volume in a cohort of 50,970 older individuals, accounting for modification/confounding by hypertension. Aggregated WMH risk variants were associated with altered white matter integrity (p = 2.5×10-7) in brain images from 1,738 young healthy adults, providing insight into the lifetime impact of SVD genetic risk. Mendelian randomization suggested causal association of increasing WMH-volume with stroke, Alzheimer-type dementia, and of increasing blood pressure (BP) with larger WMH-volume, notably also in persons without clinical hypertension. Transcriptome-wide colocalization analyses showed association of WMH-volume with expression of 39 genes, of which four encode known drug targets. Finally, we provide insight into BP-independent biological pathways underlying SVD and suggest potential for genetic stratification of high-risk individuals and for genetically-informed prioritization of drug targets for prevention trials.
Original languageEnglish
Article number6285
Number of pages18
JournalNature Communications
Volume11
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2020

Open Access - Access Right Statement

© 2020, The Author(s). Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/.

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