ArticleBrain structure & function2026
Brain structural pathways linking dietary patterns and cognitive performance in adolescents.
Article in Brain structure & function, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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Abstract
Dietary patterns covary with cognitive performance during adolescence, but the structural brain features associated with this covariance remain incompletely characterized. To identify structural brain correlates of cognition-aligned dietary patterns in adolescents while addressing adiposity, ethnicity adjustment, family relatedness, and multiple testing. We analyzed 3,308 adolescents from ABCD Release 5.1. Ten food-group measures were summarized by five dietary principal components (PCs). We constructed sample-derived, cognition-aligned dietary scores (PolyIQ) and used repeated five-fold family-level cross-fitting so that each participant's score was calculated using cognition-derived weights estimated without that participant or members of the same family. The original PCs provided an outcome-independent benchmark. Primary models adjusted for age, sex, pubertal stage, socioeconomic status, income-to-needs ratio, sleep, and age- and sex-standardized BMI; ethnicity was excluded from primary models and added in sensitivity analyses. Brain-cognition models and family-cluster bootstrap indirect-effect models examined fractional anisotropy (FA), cortical thickness, surface area, and regional volume. All pre-specified indirect-effect models, including nonsignificant results, were retained. Cross-fitted dietary scores were associated with crystallized cognition (β = 0.099, SE = 0.018, P < 0.001) and fluid cognition (β = 0.064, SE = 0.015, P < 0.001); the five original dietary PCs were jointly associated with both domains. Brain-cognition associations in the bilateral fornix and hippocampal cingulum remained after BMI adjustment. In the all-ROI analysis, indirect associations through right and left fornix FA survived false-discovery-rate correction for both crystallized cognition (right: 0.0067, 95% CI [0.0016, 0.0134]; left: 0.0063, [0.0013, 0.0126]) and fluid cognition (right: 0.0061, [0.0019, 0.0127]; left: 0.0052, [0.0011, 0.0106]). No gray-matter indirect effect survived correction across all tested regions. A sample-derived dietary pattern aligned with cognition covaried with FA in bilateral fornix pathways. The findings were robust to adiposity adjustment and were similar when ethnicity was added, but the cross-sectional design supports only a decomposition of shared variance, not a causal or temporally ordered mechanism.
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