Right Hippocampus

Overview

The bilateral right hippocampus, as defined in the Harvard-Oxford subcortical maxprob thr25 1mm atlas, is a medial temporal lobe structure composed primarily of allocortical gray matter, including the cornu ammonis (CA fields), dentate gyrus, and subiculum, arranged along a curved longitudinal axis parallel to the temporal horn of the lateral ventricle. It is critically involved in episodic and declarative memory formation, spatial navigation, contextual processing, and regulation of stress responses via extensive reciprocal connections with the entorhinal cortex, amygdala, thalamus, and prefrontal regions. Functionally, the right hippocampus has been particularly associated with spatial memory and navigation, visuo-spatial context encoding, and the consolidation of long-term memory traces, while also participating in network-level interactions with the default mode network during memory retrieval and imagination. Cytoarchitectonically, it exhibits a laminar organization distinct from neocortex, and is vulnerable to hypoxic-ischemic injury, neurodegenerative processes (including Alzheimer’s disease), and mesial temporal lobe epilepsy. Hippocampus

The right hippocampus, as defined in the Harvard-Oxford subcortical atlas, shows robust genetic associations in GWAS with traits related to memory, cognition, and psychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders, with many effects shared bilaterally but sometimes showing right-lateralized or hemisphere-specific influences on volume and connectivity. Large-scale imaging–genetics studies (e.g., ENIGMA, UK Biobank) have identified common variants in and near genes involved in neurodevelopment and synaptic plasticity—such as BDNF, DPP4, SLC4A10, MSRB3, WIF1, and genes in the MAPT and APOE regions—associated with hippocampal volume, including right-sided measures, and these same loci often overlap with risk for Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia, major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, and epilepsy. Polygenic risk scores for Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia are consistently linked to reduced hippocampal volume, sometimes with stronger or earlier effects in the right hippocampus, while depression- and stress-related risk variants (e.g., in FKBP5 and HPA-axis genes) have been associated with right hippocampal structural differences and altered stress reactivity. Additional GWAS have implicated hippocampal subfield and hemispheric asymmetry variants in memory performance, educational attainment, and general cognitive ability, supporting a model in which right hippocampal structure and function are shaped by a distributed set of neurodevelopmental, synaptic, and neurodegenerative pathways that also confer vulnerability to major psychiatric and neurological disorders.

Overview generated by GPT-4o (2026).

Region ID: 19
Hemisphere: bilateral
Atlas: HarvardOxford sub maxprob thr25 1mm

Right Hippocampus – Black Background (Full Brain)

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Right Hippocampus – White Background (Full Brain)

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Triplanar View – T1 Background

Triplanar View – Ghost Brain