Preventing depression and its concomitant health issues is critical to promote healthy
aging and extend the lifespan. It is well known that depression and poor health are
intertwined (
1
), but why they are intertwined remains an area of active inquiry. The idea that depression
may share underlying biology—including common genetic mechanisms—with other health
conditions is appealing, as knowledge of such mechanisms could inform treatments to
ameliorate both. To that end, year upon year we are learning more about the complex
genetic architecture of major depression (
2
), which provides us in theory with increasingly powerful genome-wide tools to study
the relationship between depression and health. Thus far, such tools have offered
a relatively focused view of depression’s shared genetic risk with specific comorbidities,
such as cardiovascular disease. The genetics underlying depression is expected to
be highly pleiotropic (i.e., associated with many traits) and could thus provide a
window into a much broader spectrum of mental and physical illnesses—though this remains
to be fully characterized.
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References
- The Lancet Psychiatry Commission: A blueprint for protecting physical health in people with mental illness.Lancet Psychiatry. 2019; 6: 675-712
- The genetic basis of major depression.Psychol Med. 2021; 51: 2217-2230
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- Polygenic loading for major depression is associated with specific medical comorbidity.Transl Psychiatry. 2017; 7: e1238
- Genetic risk for major depressive disorder and loneliness in sex-specific associations with coronary artery disease.Mol Psychiatry. 2021; 26: 4254-4264
- Penetrance and pleiotropy of polygenic risk scores for schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression among adults in the US Veterans Affairs Health Care System [published online ahead of print Sep 14].JAMA Psychiatry. 2022;
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Article info
Publication history
Accepted:
September 28,
2022
Received:
September 27,
2022
Identification
Copyright
© 2022 Society of Biological Psychiatry.
ScienceDirect
Access this article on ScienceDirectLinked Article
- Polygenic Liability to Depression Is Associated With Multiple Medical Conditions in the Electronic Health Record: Phenome-wide Association Study of 46,782 IndividualsBiological PsychiatryVol. 92Issue 12
- PreviewMajor depressive disorder (MDD) is a leading cause of disease-associated disability, with much of the increased burden due to psychiatric and medical comorbidity. This comorbidity partly reflects common genetic influences across conditions. Integrating molecular-genetic tools with health records enables tests of association with the broad range of physiological and clinical phenotypes. However, standard phenome-wide association studies analyze associations with individual genetic variants. For polygenic traits such as MDD, aggregate measures of genetic risk may yield greater insight into associations across the clinical phenome.
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