RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 KIBRA Polymorphism Is Related to Enhanced Memory and Elevated Hippocampal Processing
JF The Journal of Neuroscience
JO J. Neurosci.
FD Society for Neuroscience
SP 14218
OP 14222
DO 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3292-11.2011
VO 31
IS 40
A1 Kauppi, Karolina
A1 Nilsson, Lars-Göran
A1 Adolfsson, Rolf
A1 Eriksson, Elias
A1 Nyberg, Lars
YR 2011
UL http://www.jneurosci.org/content/31/40/14218.abstract
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.