Portrait of Chloé Savignac is unavailable

Chloé Savignac

PhD - McGill University
Supervisor
Danilo Bzdok
Research Topics
Computational Biology
Computational Neuroscience
Medical Machine Learning
Google Scholar
GitHub

Publications

APOE alleles are associated with sex-specific structural differences in brain regions affected in Alzheimer’s disease and related dementia
Chloé Savignac
Sylvia Villeneuve
AmanPreet Badhwar
Karin Saltoun
Kimia Shafighi
Chris Zajner
Vaibhav Sharma
Sarah A. Gagliano Taliun
Sali Farhan
Judes Poirier
Danilo Bzdok
2022-12-01
PLoS Biology (published)
doi.org
APOE ɛ2 vs APOE ɛ4 dosage shows sex-specific links to hippocampus-default network subregion co-variation
Chloé Savignac
Sylvia Villeneuve
AmanPreet Badhwar
Karin Saltoun
Kimia Shafighi
Chris Zajner
Vaibhav Sharma
Sarah A Gagliano Taliun
Sali Farhan
Judes Poirier
Danilo Bzdok
Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD) are marked by intracellular tau aggregates in the medial-temporal lobe (MTL) and extracel… (see more)lular amyloid aggregates in the default network (DN). Here, we sought to clarify ADRD-related co-dependencies between the MTL’s most vulnerable structure, the hippocampus (HC), and the highly associative DN at a subregion resolution. We confronted the effects of APOE ɛ2 and ɛ4, rarely investigated together, with their impact on HC-DN co-variation regimes at the population level. In a two-pronged decomposition of structural brain scans from ∼40,000 UK Biobank participants, we located co-deviating structural patterns in HC and DN subregions as a function of ADRD family risk. Across the disclosed HC-DN signatures, recurrent deviations in the CA1, CA2/3, molecular layer, fornix’s fimbria, and their cortical partners related to ADRD risk. Phenome-wide profiling of HC-DN co- variation expressions from these population signatures revealed male-specific associations with air-pollution, and female-specific associations with cardiovascular traits. We highlighted three main factors associated with brain-APOE associations across the different gene variants: happiness, and satisfaction with friendships, and with family. We further showed that APOE ɛ2/2 interacts preferentially with HC-DN co-variation patterns in estimating social lifestyle in males and physical activity in females. Our findings reinvigorate the often-neglected interplay between APOE ɛ2 dosage and sex, which we have linked to fine-grained structural divergences indicative of ADRD susceptibility.
2022-03-15
bioRxiv (preprint)
doi.org