Read the full paper in BRAIN COMMUNICATIONS here: academic.oup.com/braincomms/article/6/4/fcae220/7703144
Head motion in the UK Biobank imaging subsample: longitudinal stability, associations with psychological and physical health, and risk of incomplete data
Joey Ward, Simon R Cox, Terry Quinn, Laura M Lyall, Rona J Strawbridge, Emma Russell, Jill P Pell, William Stewart, Breda Cullen, Heather Whalley, Donald M Lyall, Head motion in the UK Biobank imaging subsample: longitudinal stability, associations with psychological and physical health, and risk of incomplete data, Brain Communications, Volume 6, Issue 4, 2024, fcae220, doi.org/10.1093/braincomms/fcae220
Participant motion in brain magnetic resonance imaging is associated with processing problems including potentially non-useable/incomplete data. This has implications for representativeness in research. Few large studies have investigated predictors of increased motion in the first instance. We exploratively tested for association between multiple psychological and physical health traits with concurrent motion during T1 structural, diffusion, average resting-state and task functional magnetic resonance imaging in N = 52 951 UK Biobank imaging subsample participants. These traits included history of cardiometabolic, inflammatory, neurological and psychiatric conditions, as well as concurrent cognitive test scores and anthropometric traits. We tested for stability in motion in participants with longitudinal imaging data. All functional and T1 structural motion variables were significantly intercorrelated. Diffusion motion variables showed weaker correlations around r = 0.1. Most physical and psychological phenotypes showed significant association with at least one measure of increased motion including specifically in participants with complete useable data. Poorer values in most health traits predicted lower odds of complete imaging data, with the largest association for history of traumatic brain injury Worse psychological and physical health are consistent predictors of increased average functional and structural motion during brain imaging and associated with lower odds of complete data. Average motion levels were largely consistent across modalities and longitudinally in participants with repeat data. Together, these findings have implications for representativeness and bias in imaging studies of generally healthy population samples.