Saguenay Youth Study (SYS)
Saguenay Youth Study, adolescents and their parents
Two-generation French-Canadian cohort from the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean founder population: brain and abdominal MRI in 1,029 adolescents aged 12 to 18 and 664 of their parents, with genome-wide genotypes and cardiometabolic and mental health phenotypes. Shared on request.
Overview
The Saguenay Youth Study (SYS) is a family-based cohort from the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region of Quebec, a population with a known genetic founder effect. It was set up to study how genes and early exposures, above all maternal smoking during pregnancy, shape the brain and cardiometabolic health from adolescence into middle age. The study has an adolescent arm and a parent arm, described together in one cohort profile with one request route. The principal investigators are Zdenka Pausova and Tomáš Paus.
Composition
Wave 1 (2003 to 2012) enrolled 1,029 adolescents from 481 families, recruited through high schools. Each had at least one sibling aged 12 to 18, and both biological parents were French-Canadian and born in the region. About half were exposed to maternal smoking during pregnancy. Their 962 parents gave a partial assessment without MRI in Wave 1. In Wave 2 (2012 to 2015), 664 parents from 382 families had the complete assessment, including MRI. All participants are genome-wide genotyped, and a subset of 144 adolescents and 288 parents has DNA methylation data. Other domains cover cognition, mental health, substance use, diet, sleep, physical activity, family environment, blood pressure and blood biochemistry.
Acquisition
The design paper describes the adolescent protocol on a Philips 1.0 T scanner: 3D T1-weighted, T2-weighted and proton-density images plus a magnetization transfer pair. The parent protocol of Wave 2 ran on a Siemens Avanto 1.5 T scanner at a clinic in Chicoutimi with T1-weighted, magnetization transfer, 64-direction diffusion and 12 minutes of resting-state fMRI. Both arms had T1-weighted abdominal scans to measure visceral and subcutaneous fat.
Known limitations
- Images are not public. The cohort profile only names the two principal investigators as contacts, and the study website it cites is offline.
- The cohort comes from a founder population of French-Canadian descent, which limits how far results generalise.
- Diffusion and resting-state fMRI exist for the parents only; the adolescent and parent scans used different scanners and field strengths.
- The papers do not state how many participants have each sequence, so per-sequence counts are not listed.
Cohort
Aggregate numbers from the sources below. Bars are relative to the 1,693 subjects.
Age
Modality
subjects
- MRI 1,693 100%
Contrast / sequence
subjects, values can overlap
- T1-weighted 1,693 100%
Anatomy
subjects
- Brain 1,693 100%
- Abdomen 1,693 100%
Country
subjects
- Canada 1,693 100%
License and access
Our reading of the license, not legal advice. Before you use the data, read the original license and confirm that your use is allowed. We take no responsibility for how you use a dataset. Full disclaimer
Ask the authors or the data holder. No published process or terms, and access is at their discretion
The cohort profile states that data are available on request to Dr Zdenka Pausova and Dr Tomáš Paus. The study website named there (saguenay-youth-study.org) returns 404.
No published license or data use terms
The data holder has published no license and no data use terms. Any use, sharing or commercial right has to be agreed with the data holder, and nothing can be assumed to be allowed. Default copyright and data protection law still apply.
The cohort profile gives a request route but no terms of use. No license or data use agreement was found; the study website is offline.
What you can do
- Commercial use Not stated
- Not stated
- Train ML models Not stated
- Create derived data Not stated
- Publish results Not stated
What you can share
- Share the data Not stated
- Share derived data Not stated
- Share trained models Not stated
What you must do
- Cite or credit Not stated
- Share alike Not stated
- Sign an agreement Not stated
- Ethics approval Not stated
- Manuscript review Not stated
- Release code Not stated
- Return results Not stated
- Delete after use Not stated
Limits
- No re-identification Not stated
- Location limits Not stated
Citation
Pausova Z, Paus T, Abrahamowicz M, Bernard M, Gaudet D, Leonard G, Peron M, Pike GB, Richer L, Séguin JR, Veillette S. Cohort Profile: The Saguenay Youth Study (SYS). International Journal of Epidemiology 46(2):e19 (2017). doi:10.1093/ije/dyw023
All numbers
Every number on this page, as stored in stats.csv, with its source.
| Measure | Breakdown | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Subjects | total sum of the two disjoint MRI arms: 1029 adolescents (Wave 1, 2003-12) and 664 parents (Wave 2, 2012-15). A further 962 parents had a partial Wave 1 assessment without MRI | 1,693 | pausova2017 Table 1 |
| Subjects | modality=MR brain and abdominal MRI in the complete assessment of both arms | 1,693 | pausova2017 Table 1; What has been measured? |
| Subjects | anatomy=brain | 1,693 | pausova2017 Table 1; What has been measured? |
| Subjects | anatomy=abdomen abdominal MRI for visceral and subcutaneous fat | 1,693 | pausova2017 Table 1; What has been measured? |
| Subjects | contrast=T1w T1-weighted brain images in both arms | 1,693 | pausova2017 What has been measured? |
| Subjects | age=12-18 adolescents; siblings aged 12 to 18 years were recruited, mean age 15.0 (SD 1.8) | 1,029 | pausova2017 Who is in the cohort?; Table 1 |
| Subjects | country=CA Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region of Quebec | 1,693 | pausova2017 Who is in the cohort? |
Sources
The keys used in the table above.
- pausova2017 Pausova et al. 2017, Cohort Profile, International Journal of Epidemiology paper
- pausova2007 Pausova et al. 2007, Design of the Saguenay Youth Study, Human Brain Mapping paper
- paus2015 Paus et al. 2015, Saguenay Youth Study, a multi-generational approach, Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience paper