Abstract
Depression and anxiety are highly prevalent and comorbid psychiatric traits that cause considerable burden worldwide. Here we use factor analysis and genomic structural equation modelling to investigate the genetic factor structure underlying 28 items assessing depression, anxiety and neuroticism, a closely related personality trait. Symptoms of depression and anxiety loaded on two distinct, although highly genetically correlated factors, and neuroticism items were partitioned between them. We used this factor structure to conduct genome-wide association analyses on latent factors of depressive symptoms (89 independent variants, 61 genomic loci) and anxiety symptoms (102 variants, 73 loci) in the UK Biobank. Of these associated variants, 72% and 78%, respectively, replicated in an independent cohort of approximately 1.9 million individuals with self-reported diagnosis of depression and anxiety. We use these results to characterize shared and trait-specific genetic associations. Our findings provide insight into the genetic architecture of depression and anxiety and comorbidity between them.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1432-1442 |
| Number of pages | 11 |
| Journal | Nature Human Behaviour |
| Volume | 5 |
| Issue number | 10 |
| Early online date | 15 Apr 2021 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Oct 2021 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We thank the research participants of all cohorts for making this study possible. This work was conducted using the UK Biobank Resource (application number 25331). J.G.T. and A.I.C. are supported by a University of Queensland Research Training Scholarship. N.G.M. received funding from the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) to conduct surveys in the QIMR Adult Twin Study. S.M. is supported by an NHMRC Fellowship.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited.
