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Background: Iron overload is observed in neurodegenerative diseases, especially Alzheimer's disease (AD) and Parkinson's disease (PD). Homozygotes for the iron-overload (haemochromatosis) causing HFE p.C282Y variant have increased risk of dementia and PD. Whether brain iron deposition is causal or secondary to the neurodegenerative processes in the general population is unclear., Methods: We analysed 39,533 UK Biobank participants of European genetic ancestry with brain MRI data. We studied brain iron estimated by R2* and quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) in 8 subcortical regions: accumbens, amygdala, caudate, hippocampus, pallidum, putamen, substantia nigra, and thalamus. We performed genome-wide associations studies (GWAS) and used Mendelian Randomization (MR) methods to estimate the causal effect of brain iron on grey matter volume, and risk of AD, non-AD and PD. We also used MR to test whether genetic liability to AD or PD causally increased brain iron (R2* and QSM)., Findings: In GWAS of R2* and QSM we replicated 83% of previously reported genetic loci and identified 174 further loci across all eight brain regions. Higher genetically predicted brain iron, using both R2* and QSM, was associated with lower grey matter volumes in the caudate, putamen and thalamus (e.g., Beta-putamenQSM: -0.37, p = 2*10-46). Higher genetically predicted thalamus R2* was associated with increased risk of non-AD dementia (OR 1.36(1.16;1.60), p = 2*10-4) but not AD (p > 0.05). In males, genetically predicted putamen R2* increased non-AD dementia risk, but not in females. Higher genetically predicted iron in the caudate, putamen, and substantia nigra was associated with an increased risk of PD (Odds Ratio QSM ∼ substantia-nigra 1.21(1.07;1.37), p = 0.003). Genetic liability to AD or PD was not associated with R2* or QSM in the dementia or PD-associated regions., Interpretation: Our genetic analysis supports a causal effect of higher iron deposition in specific subcortical brain regions for Parkinson's disease, grey matter volume, and non-Alzheimer's dementia., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest All authors declare no conflicts of interest relevant to the manuscript., (Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Speech quality is one of the main foci of speech-related research, where it is frequently studied with speech intelligibility, another essential measurement. Band-level perceptual speech intelligibility, however, has been studied frequently, whereas speech quality has not been thoroughly analyzed. In this paper, a Multiple Stimuli With Hidden Reference and Anchor (MUSHRA) inspired approach was proposed to study the individual robustness of frequency bands to noise with perceptual speech quality as the measure. Speech signals were filtered into thirty-two frequency bands with compromising real-world noise employed at different signal-to-noise ratios. Robustness to noise indices of individual frequency bands was calculated based on the human-rated perceptual quality scores assigned to the reconstructed noisy speech signals. Trends in the results suggest the mid-frequency region appeared less robust to noise in terms of perceptual speech quality. These findings suggest future research aiming at improving speech quality should pay more attention to the mid-frequency region of the speech signals accordingly., (© 2024 Acoustical Society of America.)