Asthma and affective traits in adults: a genetically informative study

Depression, anxiety and high neuroticism (affective traits) are often comorbid with asthma. A causal direction between the affective traits and asthma is difficult to determine; however, there may be a common underlying pathway attributable to shared genetic factors. Our aim was to determine whether a common genetic susceptibility exists for asthma and each of the affective traits. An adult cohort from the Swedish Twin Registry underwent questionnaire-based health assessments (n=23 693) and genotyping (n=15 908). Firstly, questionnaire-based associations between asthma and affective traits were explored. This was followed by genetic analyses: 1) polygenic risk scores (PRS) for affective traits were used as predictors of asthma in the cohort, and 2) genome-wide association results from UK Biobank were used in linkage-disequilibrium score regression (LDSC) to quantify genetic correlations between asthma and affective traits. Analyses found associations between questionnaire-based asthma and affective traits (OR 1.67, 95% CI 1.50–1.86 major depression; OR 1.45, 95% CI 1.30–1.61 anxiety; and OR 1.60, 95% CI 1.40–1.82 high neuroticism). Genetic susceptibility for neuroticism explained the variance in asthma with a dose–response effect; that is, study participants in the highest neuroticism PRS quartile were more likely to have asthma than those in the lowest quartile (OR 1.37, 95% CI 1.17–1.61). Genetic correlations were found between depression and a...
Source: European Respiratory Journal - Category: Respiratory Medicine Authors: Tags: Asthma and allergy Original Articles: Asthma Source Type: research