Estimating the heritability of reporting stressful life events captured by common genetic variants

• Published in: Psychological medicine Vol. 43; no. 9; pp. 1965 - 1971
• Main Authors: Power, R. A., Wingenbach, T., Cohen-Woods, S., Uher, R., Ng, M. Y., Butler, A. W., Ising, M., Craddock, N., Owen, M. J., Korszun, A., Jones, L., Jones, I., Gill, M., Rice, J. P., Maier, W., Zobel, A., Mors, O., Placentino, A., Rietschel, M., Lucae, S., Holsboer, F., Binder, E. B., Keers, R., Tozzi, F., Muglia, P., Breen, G., Craig, I. W., Müller-Myhsok, B., Kennedy, J. L., Strauss, J., Vincent, J. B., Lewis, C. M., Farmer, A. E., McGuffin, P.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge, UK Cambridge University Press 01.09.2013
• Subjects: Anxiety Disorders; Biological and medical sciences; Data processing; Gene-Environment Interaction; Genetic diversity; Genetic Predisposition to Disease; Genome-Wide Association Study; Genomes; Genotype & phenotype; Heritability; Humans; Life Change Events; Medical sciences; Models, Genetic; Neuroticism; Original Articles; Personality; Personality - genetics; Personality tests; Phenotype; Polymorphism, Single Nucleotide; Psychology; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychopathology. Psychiatry; Siblings - psychology; Social Environment; Stress; Stressful events; Variants; GCTA; heritability of environment; personality; stressful life events; Life events; Genetic variant; Genetics; Heritability; Personality; Genetic determinism; Stress
• ISSN: 0033-2917; 1469-8978
• DOI: 10.1017/S0033291712002589

Although usually thought of as external environmental stressors, a significant heritable component has been reported for measures of stressful life events (SLEs) in twin studies. Method We examined the variance in SLEs captured by common genetic variants from a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of 2578 individuals. Genome-wide complex trait analysis (GCTA) was used to estimate the phenotypic variance tagged by single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). We also performed a GWAS on the number of SLEs, and looked at correlations between siblings. A significant proportion of variance in SLEs was captured by SNPs (30%, p = 0.04). When events were divided into those considered to be dependent or independent, an equal amount of variance was explained for both. This 'heritability' was in part confounded by personality measures of neuroticism and psychoticism. A GWAS for the total number of SLEs revealed one SNP that reached genome-wide significance (p = 4 × 10-8), although this association was not replicated in separate samples. Using available sibling data for 744 individuals, we also found a significant positive correlation of R 2 = 0.08 in SLEs (p = 0.03). These results provide independent validation from molecular data for the heritability of reporting environmental measures, and show that this heritability is in part due to both common variants and the confounding effect of personality.