The impact of early adversity and education on genetic and brain morphological predictors of cognitive ability

Abstract

Cognitive ability is a strong predictor of occupational achievement, quality of life and physical health. While variation in cognition is strongly heritable and has been robustly associated with early environment and brain morphology, little is known about how these factors combine and interact to explain this variation in cognition. To address this, we modelled the relationship between common genetic variation, grey matter volume, early life adversity and education and cognitive ability in a UK Biobank sample of N = 5237 individuals using structural equation modelling. We tested the hypotheses that total grey matter volume would mediate the association between genetic variation and cognitive ability, and that early life adversity and educational attainment would moderate this relationship. Common genetic variation, grey matter volume and early life adversity were each significant predictors in the model, explaining ~15% of variation in cognitive ability. Contrary to our hypothesis, grey matter volume did not mediate the relation between genetic variation and cognition performance. Neither did early life adversity or educational attainment moderate this relation, although educational attainment was observed to moderate the relationship between grey matter volume and cognitive performance. We interpret these findings in terms of the modest explanatory value of currently estimated polygenic scores accounting for variation in cognitive performance (~5%), making potential mediating and moderating variables difficult to confirm.