Schizophrenia liability shares common molecular genetic risk factors with sleep duration and nightmares in childhood

Wellcome Open Research

article

Zoe E. Reed¹  Hannah J. Jones¹  Gibran Hemani¹  Stanley Zammit³  Oliver S. P. Davis¹ 

[1] Medical Research Council Integrative Epidemiology Unit, University of Bristol;Department of Population Health Sciences, Bristol Medical School, University of Bristol;Centre for Academic Mental Health, Department of Population Health Sciences, Bristol Medical School, University of Bristol;MRC Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics, Institute of Psychological Medicine and Clinical Neurosciences, Cardiff University

关键词: polygenic risk;    genetic correlation;    schizophrenia;    sleep;    childhood;    ALSPAC;   

DOI  :  10.12688/wellcomeopenres.15060.2

学科分类：内科医学

来源: Wellcome

【 摘 要 】

Background: Sleep abnormalities are common in schizophrenia, often appearing before psychosis onset; however, the mechanisms behind this are uncertain. We investigated whether genetic risk for schizophrenia is associated with sleep phenotypes.Methods: We used data from 6,058 children and 2,302 mothers from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC). We examined associations between a polygenic risk score for schizophrenia and sleep duration in both children and mothers, and nightmares in children, along with genetic covariances between these traits.Results: Polygenic risk for schizophrenia was associated with increased risk of nightmares (OR=1.07, 95% CI: 1.01, 1.14, p=0.02) in children, and also with less sleep (β=-44.52, 95% CI: −88.98, −0.07; p=0.05). We observed a similar relationship with sleep duration in mothers, although evidence was much weaker (p=0.38). Finally, we found evidence of genetic covariance between schizophrenia risk and reduced sleep duration in children and mothers, and between schizophrenia risk and nightmares in children.Conclusions: These molecular genetic results support recent findings from twin analysis that show genetic overlap between sleep disturbances and psychotic-like experiences. They also show, to our knowledge for the first time, a genetic correlation between schizophrenia liability and risk of nightmares in childhood.

【 授权许可】

CC BY