Background
Morphological abnormalities in hippocampus have been implicated in neuropsychiatric
disorders, including depression, schizophrenia, and dementia. Vascular endothelial
growth factor (VEGF) has been demonstrated to have neurogenic effects in the hippocampus
in rats. However, influence of VEGF variation on hippocampus morphology in humans
has yet to be shown. Here, an integrated genetic and neuroimaging approach was used
to investigate whether VEGF variation influences hippocampus morphology in humans.
Methods
High-resolution magnetic resonance imaging and voxel-based morphometry were used to
identify the influence of genetic variation of VEGFA [rs833068 (SNP-1), rs833070 (SNP-2), rs2146323 (SNP-3) and rs3025020 (SNP-4)] on
brain morphology in 47 healthy individuals.
Results
Variation in VEGFA SNP-2 and SNP-3 showed significant effects on hippocampus concentration.
Conclusions
The findings suggest that effects of VEGF in hippocampus found in rats extend to humans;
further understanding of effects of VEGFA variation might have important implications in identifying individuals more vulnerable
to hippocampus pathology as well as those neuropsychiatric populations most likely
to benefit from VEGF-mediated interventions.
Key words
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: August 19, 2008
Accepted:
July 2,
2008
Received in revised form:
May 30,
2008
Received:
February 28,
2008
Identification
Copyright
© 2008 Society of Biological Psychiatry. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Access this article on ScienceDirectLinked Article
- ErratumBiological PsychiatryVol. 65Issue 1
- PreviewAn error in the key for Figure 1 has been discovered in the article “Influence of Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor Variation on Human Hippocampus Morphology” by Blumberg et al., which appeared in Biological Psychiatry, Volume 64, Number 10 (Biol Psychiatry 2008; 64:901–903). In the key for Figure 1, the labels for CC and T carriers in the left figure and CC and A carriers in the right figure are switched. Therefore, the T carriers in the left graph and the A carriers in the right graph are actually represented by the black-colored diamonds, and the white-colored diamonds represent the CC.
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