Penny A Gowland

Penny A Gowland
University of Nottingham | Notts · School of Physics and Astronomy

About

807
Publications
136,026
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
23,360
Citations
Additional affiliations
September 1986 - December 1989
Institute of Cancer Research
Position
  • PhD Student
January 1990 - December 2012
University of Nottingham
Position
  • The University of Nottingham
October 1987 - December 1989
The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust
Position
  • Institute of Cancer Research

Publications

Publications (807)
Article
Full-text available
Background Early diagnosis is crucial in Alzheimer's disease (AD) for optimal treatment outcomes. Neuropsychometric assessments, particularly using the Uniform Data Set Neuropsychological Battery (UDSNB3.0) [1], provide insights into cognitive domains in early stages of Alzheimer’s disease before significant hippocampal atrophy occurs. This study l...
Article
Full-text available
Aims To examine the impact of impaired glycaemic regulation and exercise training on hepatic lipid composition in men with metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD). Materials and methods In Part A (cross-sectional design), 40 men with MASLD (liver proton density fat fraction [PDFF]≥5.56%) were recruited to one-of-two groups...
Preprint
Full-text available
Current psychiatric diagnoses are not defined by neurobiological measures which hinders the development of therapies targeting mechanisms underlying mental illness 1,2. Research confined to diagnostic boundaries yields heterogeneous biological results, whereas transdiagnostic studies often investigate individual symptoms in isolation. There is curr...
Article
Full-text available
Background Alzheimer’s disease (AD)-related neuropathological changes can occur decades before clinical symptoms. We aimed to investigate whether neurodevelopment and/or neurodegeneration affects the risk of AD, through reducing structural brain reserve and/or increasing brain atrophy, respectively. Methods We used bidirectional two-sample Mendeli...
Preprint
Full-text available
Substance use, including cigarettes and cannabis, is associated with poorer sustained attention in late adolescence and early adulthood. Previous studies were predominantly cross-sectional or under- powered and could not indicate if impairment in sustained attention was a consequence of substance- use or a marker of the inclination to engage in suc...
Article
Full-text available
Rationale For decades, cannabis has been the most widely used illicit substance in the world, particularly among youth. Research suggests that mental health problems associated with cannabis use may result from its effect on reward brain circuit, emotional processes, and cognition. However, findings are mostly derived from correlational studies and...
Article
Full-text available
Background People with cystic fibrosis (CF) can experience recurrent chest infections, pancreatic exocrine insufficiency and gastrointestinal symptoms. New cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR) modulator drugs improve lung function but gastrointestinal effects are unclear. We aimed to see if a CFTR modulator (tezacaftor-ivacaft...
Article
Full-text available
Oral dosage forms are the most widely and frequently used formulations to deliver active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), due to their ease of administration and noninvasiveness. Knowledge of intragastric release rates and gastric mixing is crucial for predicting the API release profile, especially for immediate release formulations. However, kno...
Preprint
Structural brain aging has demonstrated strong inter-individual heterogeneity and mirroring patterns with brain development. However, due to the lack of large-scale longitudinal neuroimaging studies, most of the existing research focused on the cross-sectional changes of brain aging. In this investigation, we present a data-driven approach that inc...
Preprint
Structural brain aging has demonstrated strong inter-individual heterogeneity and mirroring patterns with brain development. However, due to the lack of large-scale longitudinal neuroimaging studies, most of the existing research focused on the cross-sectional changes of brain aging. In this investigation, we present a data-driven approach that inc...
Article
Learning regularities in the environment is a fundament of human cognition, which is supported by a network of brain regions that include the hippocampus. In two experiments, we assessed the effects of selective bilateral damage to human hippocampal subregion CA3, which was associated with autobiographical episodic amnesia extending ~50 years prior...
Article
Adolescent subcortical structural brain development might underlie psychopathological symptoms, which often emerge in adolescence. At the same time, sex differences exist in psychopathology, which might be mirrored in underlying sex differences in structural development. However, previous studies showed inconsistencies in subcortical trajectories a...
Article
Full-text available
Background Lactulose is a laxative which accelerates transit and softens stool. Our aim was to investigate its mechanism of action and use this model of diarrhea to investigate the anti‐diarrheal actions of ondansetron. Methods A double‐blind, randomized, placebo‐controlled crossover study of the effect of ondansetron 8 mg in 16 healthy volunteers...
Article
During late adolescence, the brain undergoes ontogenic organization altering subcortical-cortical circuitry. This includes regions implicated in pain chronicity, and thus alterations in the adolescent ontogenic organization could predispose to pain chronicity in adulthood - however, evidence is lacking. Using resting-state functional magnetic reson...
Article
Full-text available
Adolescence is a crucial period for physical and psychological development. The impact of negative life events represents a risk factor for the onset of neuropsychiatric disorders. This study aims to investigate the relationship between negative life events and structural brain connectivity, considering both graph theory and connectivity strength....
Article
Full-text available
Background In Crohn’s Disease (CD), 10% of patients present with fibrostenosis with a further 10% progressing from inflammatory to a fibrostenotic disease behaviour over 7 years. 40% of fibrostenotic CD patients need surgery at 5 years compared to ~10% with inflammatory disease. Present non-invasive fibrosis biomarkers lack the required accuracy ne...
Preprint
Full-text available
Structural brain aging has demonstrated strong inter-individual heterogeneity and mirroring patterns with brain development. However, due to the lack of large-scale longitudinal neuroimaging studies, most of the existing research focused on the cross-sectional changes of brain aging. In this investigation, we present a data-driven approach that inc...
Article
Full-text available
Despite its crucial role in the regulation of vital metabolic and neurological functions, the genetic architecture of the hypothalamus remains unknown. Here we conducted multivariate genome-wide association studies (GWAS) using hypothalamic imaging data from 32,956 individuals to uncover the genetic underpinnings of the hypothalamus and its involve...
Article
Full-text available
Recent magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies showed that colonic volumes in children are different between health and functional constipation. The length of the colon has however been rarely measured and principally using unphysiological colon preparations or cadaver studies. The main objective of this study was to measure the length of the undi...
Article
Full-text available
Background Hippocampal formation atrophy is a well‐established imaging biomarker of several neurological diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease, temporal lobe epilepsy, and schizophrenia. The hippocampus is divided into subfields that have different functions and vary in sensitivity to different diseases. This study investigates the potential inte...
Article
Background The SARS‐CoV‐2 coronavirus has been associated with structural brain changes, consistent with its neurological manifestations. Recent studies showed a specific predilection for brainstem glial activation and hypometabolism, possibly indicating involvement of the locus coeruleus. The locus coeruleus (LC) modulates many cognitive functions...
Article
Background 7T MRI can provide high contrast and spatial resolution images for studying the volume of hippocampal subfields which can be used in conjunction with Amyloidβ 1‐42 and tau measures in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) to provide a non‐invasive alternative marker for Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Method 41 participants (20 AD and 21 healthy age‐...
Article
Background 7T MRI allows implementation of high‐resolution quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) which can be used to assess the cerebral microvascular/hypoperfusion pathogenic hypothesis in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and in the post‐SARS‐CoV2 setting to explore if there may be similarities in brain changes in these two conditions. The magnetic s...
Article
Full-text available
Background Emerging evidence indicates that COVID‐19 can negatively impact patient’s brain health (Douaud et al., 2022) (Cecchetti et al., 2022). Common clinical symptoms include brain fog, headaches, difficulty concentrating, and loss of sense of smell or taste. Some studies suggest that SARS‐CoV‐2 infection can damage the blood brain barrier eith...
Article
Background The neuropsychological battery of the Uniform Data Set (UDSNB3.0) (Weintraub et al., 2009) assesses cognition. The neuroanatomical correlates of the UDSNB3.0 have not yet been investigated. 7T MRI was used to investigate correlations between hippocampal subfield volumes and the UDSNB3.0 for Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and age‐matched health...
Article
Background People with cystic fibrosis (CF) can experience recurrent chest infections, pancreatic exocrine insufficiency and gastrointestinal symptoms. New cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR) modulator drugs improve lung function but gastrointestinal effects are unclear. We aimed to see if a CFTR modulator (tezacaftor-ivacaft...
Preprint
Full-text available
Introduction: Little is understood about the dynamic interplay between brain morphology and cognitive ability across the life course. Additionally, most existing research has focused on global morphology measures such as estimated total intracranial volume, mean thickness, and total surface area. Methods: Mendelian randomization was used to estimat...
Article
Full-text available
The cerebral ventricles are recognized as windows into brain development and disease, yet their genetic architectures, underlying neural mechanisms and utility in maintaining brain health remain elusive. Here we aggregated genetic and neuroimaging data from 61,974 participants (age range, 9 to 98 years) in five cohorts to elucidate the genetic basi...
Article
Full-text available
(1) Background: Natalizumab dramatically reduces relapses and MRI inflammatory activity (new lesions and enhancing lesions) in multiple sclerosis (MS). Chemical exchange saturation transfer (CEST) MRI can explore brain tissue in vivo with high resolution and sensitivity. We investigated if natalizumab can prevent microstructural tissue damage progr...
Article
Hemispheric lateralization and its origins have been of great interest in neuroscience for over a century. The left–right asymmetry in cortical thickness may stem from differential maturation of the cerebral cortex in the two hemispheres. Here, we investigated the spatial pattern of hemispheric differences in cortical thinning during adolescence, a...
Article
Full-text available
A growing number of evidence supports a continued distribution of autistic traits in the general population. However, brain maturation trajectories of autistic traits as well as the influence of sex on these trajectories remain largely unknown. We investigated the association of autistic traits in the general population, with longitudinal gray matt...
Article
Full-text available
Exposure to preadult environmental exposures may have long-lasting effects on mental health by affecting the maturation of the brain and personality, two traits that interact throughout the developmental process. However, environment-brain-personality covariation patterns and their mediation relationships remain unclear. In 4297 healthy participant...
Article
Parallel transmit MRI at 7 T has increasingly been adopted in research projects and provides increased signal-to-noise ratios and novel contrasts. However, the interactions of fields in the body need to be carefully considered to ensure safe scanning. Recent advances in physically flexible body coils have allowed for high-field abdominal imaging, b...
Article
Importance: Alcohol misuse in adolescence is a leading cause of disability and mortality in youth and is associated with higher risk for alcohol use disorder. Brain mechanisms underlying risk of alcohol misuse may inform prevention and intervention efforts. Objective: To identify neuromarkers of alcohol misuse using a data-driven approach, with...
Article
Full-text available
Environmental adversities constitute potent risk factors for psychiatric disorders. Evidence suggests the brain adapts to adversity, possibly in an adversity-type and region-specific manner. However, the long-term effects of adversity on brain structure and the association of individual neurobiological heterogeneity with behavior have yet to be elu...
Article
Full-text available
Smoking of cigarettes among young adolescents is a pressing public health issue. However, the neural mechanisms underlying smoking initiation and sustenance during adolescence, especially the potential causal interactions between altered brain development and smoking behaviour, remain elusive. Here, using large longitudinal adolescence imaging gene...
Article
The presence of a ‘magenstrasse’, a central ‘stomach road’ for flow and mixing of foods and drinks in the stomach had been predicted from hydrodynamic modelling. Here a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) tagging technique was used to gain novel insights on the intragastric motion of breakfast porridges in 17 healthy humans. They consumed two similar...
Article
The z-spectrum contains many pools with different exchange rates and T2 values, which can make it difficult to interpret in vivo data and complicates the design of experiments aimed at providing sensitivity to one pool. This work aims to characterise the main pools observable with MRI at 7T in the human brain. To achieve this, we acquired z-spectra...
Article
Full-text available
Bullying often results in negative coping in victims, including an increased consumption of alcohol. Recently, however, an increase in alcohol use has also been reported among perpetrators of bullying. The factors triggering this pattern are still unclear. We investigated the role of empathy in the interaction between bullying and alcohol use in an...
Article
Full-text available
Leveraging ~10 years of prospective longitudinal data on 704 participants, we examined the effects of adolescent versus young adult cannabis initiation on MRI-assessed cortical thickness development and behavior. Data were obtained from the IMAGEN study conducted across eight European sites. We identified IMAGEN participants who reported being cann...
Article
Full-text available
The temporo-basal region of the human brain is composed of the collateral, the occipito-temporal, and the rhinal sulci. We manually rated (using a novel protocol) the connections between rhinal/collateral (RS-CS), collateral/occipito-temporal (CS-OTS) and rhinal/occipito-temporal (RS-OTS) sulci, using the MRI of nearly 3400 individuals including ar...
Conference Paper
Introduction Current classification of patients with constipation into IBS with constipation (IBS-C) and functional constipation (FC) is problematic as symptoms overlap and do not differentiate mechanisms which may respond to different treatments. We aimed to determine if development of a novel classification of constipation using objective measure...
Article
Full-text available
Background Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) tagging techniques have been applied to the GI tract to assess bowel contractions and content mixing. We aimed to evaluate the dependence of a tagging measurement (for assessing chyme mixing) on inter‐observer variability in both the ascending colon (AC) and descending colon (DC) and to investigate the te...
Preprint
Full-text available
Human brain morphology undergoes complex developmental changes with diverse regional trajectories. Various biological factors influence cortical thickness development, but human data are scarce. Building on methodological advances in neuroimaging of large cohorts, we show that population-based developmental trajectories of cortical thickness unfold...
Article
Full-text available
Recent studies proposed a general psychopathology factor underlying common comorbidities among psychiatric disorders. However, its neurobiological mechanisms and generalizability remain elusive. In this study, we used a large longitudinal neuroimaging cohort from adolescence to young adulthood (IMAGEN) to define a neuropsychopathological (NP) facto...
Article
Full-text available
Although many studies of the adolescent brain identified positive associations between cognitive abilities and cortical thickness, little is known about mechanisms underlying such brain-behavior relationships. With experience-induced plasticity playing an important role in shaping the cerebral cortex throughout life, it is likely that some of the i...
Article
Conduct-related behavioral problems are among the most common psychiatric conditions diagnosed during adolescence. However, few studies have examined the association between conduct problems and cerebral cortical development. Herein, we characterize the association between age-related cerebral cortical change and conduct problems in a large longitu...
Article
Full-text available
The period of adolescence brings with it a dynamic interaction between social context and behaviour, structural brain development, and anxiety and depressive symptoms. The rate of volumetric change in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and amygdala have been implicated in socioemotional development in adolescence; typically, there is thinni...
Article
Background: Owing to its role in glucose homeostasis, liver glycogen concentration ([LGly]) can be a marker of altered metabolism seen in disorders that impact the health of children. However, there is a paucity of normative data for this measure in children to allow comparison with patients, and time-course assessment of [LGly] in response to fee...
Article
Full-text available
Objective Magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) provides a powerful method of measuring fat fraction. However, previous studies have shown that MRS results give lower values compared with visual estimates from biopsies in fibrotic livers. This study investigated these discrepancies and considered whether a tissue water content correction, as assess...
Article
SARS‐CoV‐2 causes neurological, psychiatric and neurocognitive deficits in a large proportion of patients via direct or indirect viral invasion, systemic or intracranial inflammation, micro‐ or macrovascular pathologies, and hypoxic or systemic metabolic complications. The insult to brain function during the acute phase of COVID‐19 may accelerate n...
Article
Full-text available
Recent longitudinal studies in youth have reported MRI correlates of prospective anxiety symptoms during adolescence, a vulnerable period for the onset of anxiety disorders. However, their predictive value has not been established. Individual prediction through machine-learning algorithms might help bridge the gap to clinical relevance. A voting cl...
Article
Full-text available
Sleep is an important contributor for neural maturation and emotion regulation during adolescence, with long-term effects on a range of white matter tracts implicated in affective processing in at-risk populations. We investigated the effects of adolescent sleep patterns on longitudinal changes in white matter development and whether this is relate...
Article
Full-text available
With the growth of decentralized/federated analysis approaches in neuroimaging, the opportunities to study brain disorders using data from multiple sites has grown multi-fold. One such initiative is the Neuromark, a fully automated spatially constrained independent component analysis (ICA) that is used to link brain network abnormalities among diff...
Article
Full-text available
The neurobiological bases of the association between development and psychopathology remain poorly understood. Here, we identify a shared spatial pattern of cortical thickness (CT) in normative development and several psychiatric and neurological disorders. Principal component analysis (PCA) was applied to CT of 68 regions in the Desikan-Killiany a...
Conference Paper
Introduction Cystic Fibrosis Transmembrane Regulator (CFTR) modulator therapies target multiple organ systems, but chiefly improve lung health. Modulators have maximal benefit when commenced in early childhood. There is a need for sensitive assessment of lung health in children. We have developed an MRI protocol to assess lung structure and functio...
Article
Full-text available
Pre-labour uterine contractions, occurring throughout pregnancy, are an important phenomenon involving the placenta in addition to the myometrium. They alter the uterine environment and thus potentially the blood supply to the fetus and may thus provide crucial insights into the processes of labour. Assessment in-vivo is however restricted due to t...