世代間の伝達の理解
Hello everyone, SCIEN-SPOT is a podcast that shines the spotlight on the latest scientific
technology from Japan. Your host is REN from SCIEN-TALK. Today I am going to talk about
a new discovery concerning the shape of our brains. We all experienced moments where we
was noticed how much children resemble their parents in facial features or personality.
But did you know that beyond these visible traits, the shape of our brains can also be remarkably
similar between parents and children? This isn't just a coincidence. The phenomenon where traits,
behavior, and even mental health conditions seem to be passed down from our generation to the next
is called intergenerational transmission. Both genetic and environmental factors are believed
to play a role in this, but the exact mechanisms are still unclear. Exploring the similarities in
brain shape is considered a crucial clue in revealing these complex mechanisms.
A significant challenge in previous research was that most studies primarily focused on the brain
similarities between mother and children. As a result, detailed investigations, including of
others, were often insufficient. This made it difficult to determine if the mechanisms of
親子間の脳形状研究
intergenerational transmission were consistent between mother-child and father-child pairs.
Even if they were understood. Tackling this challenge was a
research group from Tohoku University in Japan. They have been advancing a neuroscience project
called Family Brain Parent Child Tutorials. This is a father, a mother, and their child.
Overcoming the known difficulty in encouraging fathers to participate in studies,
they implemented various strategies such as broad advertising, flexible scheduling to accommodate
participants, and systems that allow the parents and their children to participate separately.
Through these efforts, they successfully collected data from an impressive 289% child tutorials.
This dataset is unique and extremely valuable globally.
For this particular study, they analyzed the data from 150 tutorials where the child was
the high school age or older. From the brain MRI images, they calculated four types of features
related to the brain's shape. These include cerebral cortical thickness, the thickness
of the brain's surface, and surface area, the overall extent of the cerebral complex,
親子間の脳の類似性
the jurification index, which measures the complexity of the brain's solid, brain folds,
or wrinkles, and subcortical structure volume, which is the volume of important
regions located beneath the cerebral cortex, such as the hippocampus and amygdala.
To give you an analogy, if you imagine the brain as a house, this feature would be like the
thickness of the walls, the total floor area, the complexity of the room layout,
and the size of specific important rooms within it. Brain similarity between parents and children
was evaluated using a statistical measure called the correlation coefficient. This
indicated the strength of the relationship between two variables where a value closer to
one signifies a stronger relationship. To confirm that the resemblances were truly significant,
the researchers calculated the correlation coefficient for these features between actual
parents and children. Then, to serve as a baseline, they created 1000 sets of the child
and stranger's parent pairs for comparison. If the correlation coefficient between the actual
parent and child was statistically significantly higher than that of the child and stranger's
脳の形状と遺伝的影響
parent, then the parent-child brains are deemed similar. This is akin to precisely
quantifying whether your shoe size is more strongly correlated with your actual parent's
shoe size than with randomly selected strangers. The results of this detailed analysis revealed
a fascinating discovery. Parts of a child's brain were found to resemble only the mother,
both parents or neither parent. Even more significantly, it became clear that these
patterns of resemblance differ depending on the child's sex. This means that the way a brain
resembles a parent can vary based on the child and parent's sex combination. For example,
the pattern for the father-daughter pair might be different from the mother-son pair.
It's like a family photo album where some children look exactly like dad, some like mom. Some were
mix of birth and others have their own unique characteristics.
This breakthrough provides a crucial foundation for interpreting the factors that influence the
development of individual brain regions. For instance, brain regions that resemble both
father and son might be influenced by the shared genres or environments between them,
遺伝と脳の関係
while the regions that resemble neither parent could be strongly affected by experiences outside
the family. This research serves as a significant clue for a future investigation into deeper
questions such as why parent-child brains are similar and why sex plays a role in how brains
resemble each other. The research group hopes that the development of this study will lead to
new treatment methods to break the cycle of mental distress across generations and even to the
development of entirely new technologies that promote the inheritance of adaptive traits and
complex skills. It is expected to be a new starting point in the neurosciences and providing
cross-generational support for people's mental health. So that's all for today's science spot.
This podcast is broadcast daily on weekday morning in both Japanese and English. I hope
today's discovery has changed how you view family connection, even just a little. I'd love for you
to listen to the podcast and post your notes and thoughts with the hashtag science spot. See you
next time!
