United States: Neuroticism is a personality trait that means a person might feel anxious, upset, or stressed more easily. It is connected to mental health problems like anxiety or depression and can also be linked to serious medical issues.
Our findings deepened the understanding the neuroticism’s genetic f architecture and also provide the potential targets for the future mechanistic research wrote WU li and their colleagues.
As reported by the Medicalxpress, technical development has created new scenarios within the diagnosis of genetic predispositions to diseases and psychoses. Similar methods can also be used as a tool to obtain insights on genes which make a person more likely to display certain personality characteristics including the neuroticism.
Previous investigations have identified more than a hundred genomic sites that are linked to neuroticism. Said this, there is still much that has been left unknown regarding this personality trait’s heritability.
Scientists at Fudan University in China attempted to extend findings based on this approach by harnessing data from the UK Biobank, which is a genetic and phenotypic database of more than 500,000 UK residents.
It was included in their paper – Nature Human Behavior – where they have identified 14 genes which they said were associated with neuroticism in the analysed data set, 12 of them have not been reported before.
As the researchers pointed out, the prior genetic studies of neuroticism have mainly focused on common variants only, Xin-Rui Wu, Ze-Yu Li and their colleagues said in the paper.
Here we report a large-scale exome analysis of white British individuals in UK Biobank on neuroticism and the contribution of coding variants. For low frequency variants, the collapsing analysis revealed that there were 14 genes associated with neuroticism.
In total for common variants, we found 78 hits pointing at 6 novel genes. We then cross validated these variants using meta-analysis across four other ancestries from UK Biobank and summary results from 23andMe cohort. Moreover, these variants influenced the social spread of neuropsychiatric disorders, cognition, and brain structure processes.
The neuroticism research evidences that Wu, Li and his team have collected in the recent past feed the current knowledge concerning neuroticism and its heritability.
In the future, they may be used for prompts of new genetic studies of neuroticism or other traits. In the long run, some of these studies may serve as the basis for the creation of diagnostic and therapeutic instruments in relation to neuropsychiatric diseases associated with definite personality characteristics.