Heritability of Brain Resilience to Perturbation in Humans

Resilience is the capacity of complex systems to persist to external perturbations and retain their functional properties and performance. In the present study, we investigated how individual variations in brain resilience, which might influence response to stress, aging and disease, are influenced by genetics and/or the environment, with potential implications for the implementation of resilience-boosting interventions. Resilience estimates were derived from in silico lesioning of either brain regions or functional connections constituting the connectome of healthy individuals belonging to two different large and unique datasets of twins, specifically: 463 twins from the Human Connectome Project and 453 twins from the Colorado Longitudinal Twins Study. Moderate heritability was found for several topological indexes of brain efficiency and modularity. Moreover, evidence of heritability was found for resilience measures based on removal of brain connections rather than specific single regions, suggesting that genetic influences over resilience are preferentially directed toward region-to-region communication rather than local brain activity. Specifically, the strongest genetic influence was observed for moderately weak, long-range connections between a specific subset of functional brain networks, i.e. the Default Mode, Visual and Sensorimotor networks. Findings might help identifying a link between brain resilience and network-level alterations observed in neurological and psychiatric diseases, as well as inform future studies investigating brain shielding interventions against physiological and pathological perturbations.