PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Kauppi, Karolina
AU  - Nilsson, Lars-Göran
AU  - Adolfsson, Rolf
AU  - Eriksson, Elias
AU  - Nyberg, Lars
TI  - KIBRA Polymorphism Is Related to Enhanced Memory and Elevated Hippocampal Processing
AID  - 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3292-11.2011
DP  - 2011 Oct 05
TA  - The Journal of Neuroscience
PG  - 14218--14222
VI  - 31
IP  - 40
4099  - http://www.jneurosci.org/content/31/40/14218.short
4100  - http://www.jneurosci.org/content/31/40/14218.full
SO  - J. Neurosci.2011 Oct 05; 31
AB  - Several studies have linked the KIBRA rs17070145 T polymorphism to superior episodic memory in healthy humans. One study investigated the effect of KIBRA on brain activation patterns (Papassotiropoulos et al., 2006) and observed increased hippocampal activation in noncarriers of the T allele during retrieval. Noncarriers were interpreted to need more hippocampal activation to reach the same performance level as T carriers. Using large behavioral (N = 2230) and fMRI (N = 83) samples, we replicated the KIBRA effect on episodic memory performance, but found increased hippocampal activation in T carriers during episodic retrieval. There was no evidence of compensatory brain activation in noncarriers within the hippocampal region. In the main fMRI sample, T carriers performed better than noncarriers during scanning but, importantly, the difference in hippocampus activation remained after post hoc matching according to performance, sex, and age (N = 64). These findings link enhanced memory performance in KIBRA T allele carriers to elevated hippocampal functioning, rather than to neural compensation in noncarriers.