The Impact of Polygenic Risk for Schizophrenia on Memory-related Activation in the Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC)

Abstract

Introduction: Schizophrenia (Sz) patients show impairments of cognitive functions, esp. short-term memory, and also alterations of hippocampal structure and function. However, it is unclear how genetic liability contributes to these effects, since sibling studies are limited. We tested the hypothesis that memory-related hippocampal taskrelated activation in an encoding paradigm using fMRI would correlate with a polygenic measure of schizphrenia risk. Method: We studied a total of n = 386 healthy subjects (147 men, 239 women, aged 31.4, SD = 11.8 years) from the FOR2107 study while performing an encoding-task using functional MRI at 3 Tesla. The sample was genotyped using the Infinium PsychArray BeadChip and a polygenic risk score (PGRS) was calculated for SZ using PGC SZ GWAS results.