Genetic effect on human brain studied by aged twin pairs. Had differences of twin's environment induced brain plasticity ?

2016 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 15K12701
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Challenging Exploratory Research
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Research Field: Applied health science
• Research Institution: Osaka University
• Principal Investigator: Yorifuji Shiro 大阪大学, 医学系研究科, 名誉教授 (80191675)
• Research Collaborator: ARAKI Toshihiko ; ONISHI Mai
• Project Period (FY): 2015-04-01 – 2017-03-31
• Keywords: ふたご研究 / 脳磁図 / 運動機能 / 言語機能 / 遺伝 / 環境

Outline of Final Research Achievements

It’s well known that human brain has neuro-plasticity, but there are no data concerning about how human brain changes during long life influenced by gene and environment. Twin study can only solve this question. So we measured movement evoked brain magnetic fields of monozygotic and dizygotic twins during simple finger movement tasks which seemed to be less influenced by environment by magnetoencephalography, and the result of latency differences of movement evoked fields between each twins were significantly small. On the other hand, language function which were more influenced by environment, were measured during verb generation tasks, and the result was that the power values of gamma band event related desynchronization in left frontal area were more significantly related between monozygotic twin pairs than dizygotic and unrelated pairs. We firstly revealed that gene and environment were nearly the same extent influenced on language function in aged human brain.

Free Research Field

磁気神経生理学