Heritability of connectivity and disconnectivity of the brain in a population-based study

We present the largest population-based heritability study of the human brain structural connectome, including a pathology-sensitive extension, the disconnectome. The disconnectome maps the effect of white matter lesions throughout the brain. The connectome and disconnectome were generated from diffusion-weighted images of 3255 unrelated subjects from the Rotterdam Study aged between 45 and 99 years. Graph theory measures were derived for both the connectome and disconnectome. Genotypes were used to derive genetic relationship matrices between individuals for heritability analyses. High measures of heritability, from 33% to 51%, were found across all connectivity measures. The disconnectome showed more significantly heritable connectivity measures than the connectome, suggesting that the new proposed measure may reveal additional or complementary information about the genetic architecture of the human brain.