The effects of genetic and modifiable risk factors on brain regions vulnerable to ageing and disease

For the present work the imaging cohort of UK Biobank was used and we included 39,676 subjects who had been scanned and for whom the brain scans had been preprocessed at the time of the final set of analyses (M/F 47–53%; 44–82 years, mean age 64 ± 7 years; as of October 2020)^41,42. Structural T1-weighted scans for each participant were processed using the FSL-VBM automated tool to extract their grey matter map^43,44. The ‘last in, first out’ (LIFO) network of mainly higher-order brain regions was initially identified by performing a linked independent component analysis on the grey matter images of another, lifespan observational cohort of 484 subjects^8,45,46. This map of interest, along with the other 69 generated by the analysis, was first realigned to the UK Biobank ‘standard’ space defined by the grey matter average across the first 15,000 participants, then…