Paediatric population neuroimaging is an emerging field that falls at the intersection between developmental neuroscience and epidemiology. A key feature of population neuroimaging studies involves large-scale recruitment that is representative of the general population. One successful approach for population neuroimaging is to embed neuroimaging studies within large epidemiological cohorts. The Generation R Study is a large, prospective population-based birth-cohort in which nearly 10,000 pregnant mothers were recruited between 2002 and 2006 with repeated measurements in the children and their parents over time. Magnetic resonance imaging was included in 2009 with the scanning of 1070 6-to-9-year-old children. The second neuroimaging wave was initiated in April 2013 with a total of 4245 visiting the MRI suite and 4087 9-to-11-year-old children being scanned. The sequences included high-resolution structural MRI, 35-direction diffusion weighted imaging, and a 6 min and 2 s resting-state functional MRI scan. The goal of this paper is to provide an overview of the imaging protocol and the overlap between the neuroimaging data and metadata. We conclude by providing a brief overview of results from our first wave of neuroimaging, which highlights a diverse array of questions that can be addressed by merging the fields of developmental neuroscience and epidemiology.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10654-017-0319-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

The development of brain structure and function shows large inter-individual variation. The extent to which this variation is due to genetic or environmental influences has been investigated in twin studies using structural and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). The current review presents an overview of twin studies using MRI in children, adults and elderly, and focuses on cross-sectional and longitudinal designs. The majority of the investigated brain measures are heritable to a large extent (60–80 %), although spatial differences in heritability are observed as well. Cross-sectional studies suggest that heritability estimates slightly increase from childhood to adulthood. Long-term longitudinal studies are better suited to study developmental changes in heritability, but these studies are limited. Results so far suggest that the heritability of change over time is relatively low or absent, but more studies are needed to confirm these findings. Compared to brain structure, twin studies of brain function are scarce, and show much lower heritability estimates (~40 %). The insights from heritability studies aid our understanding of individual differences in brain structure and function. With the recent start of large genetic MRI consortia, the chance of finding genes that explain the heritability of brain morphology increases. Gene identification may provide insight in biological mechanisms involved in brain processes, which in turn will learn us more about healthy and disturbed brain functioning.

The Broad Antisocial Behavior Consortium entails the largest collaboration to date on the genetic architecture of ASB, and the first results suggest that ASB may be highly polygenic and has potential heterogeneous genetic effects across sex.

Differences in cortical morphology related to autistic traits along a continuum in a large population-based sample of school-aged children were found. Part of these differences remained after excluding the most severely affected children. These findings lend support to an extension of the neurobiology of autistic traits to the general population.

No abstract