Associations Between Polygenic Scores for Cognitive and Non-cognitive Factors of Educational Attainment and Measures of Behavior, Psychopathology, and Neuroimaging in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study.
MEDRXIV : THE PREPRINT SERVER FOR HEALTH SCIENCES 2023:2023.10.27.23297675. [PMID:
37961716 PMCID:
PMC10635216 DOI:
10.1101/2023.10.27.23297675]
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Abstract
Background
Both cognitive and non-cognitive (e.g., traits like curiosity) factors are critical for social and emotional functioning and independently predict educational attainment. These factors are heritable and genetically correlated with a range of health-relevant traits and behaviors in adulthood (e.g., risk-taking, psychopathology). However, whether these associations are present during adolescence, and to what extent these relationships diverge, could have implications for adolescent health and well-being.
Methods
Using data from 5,517 youth of European ancestry from the ongoing Adolescent Brain Cognitive DevelopmentSM Study, we examined associations between polygenic scores (PGS) for cognitive and non-cognitive factors and outcomes related to cognition, socioeconomic status, risk tolerance and decision-making, substance initiation, psychopathology, and brain structure.
Results
Cognitive and non-cognitive PGSs were both positively associated with cognitive performance and family income, and negatively associated with ADHD and severity of psychotic-like experiences. The cognitive PGS was also associated with greater risk-taking, delayed discounting, and anorexia, as well as lower likelihood of nicotine initiation. The cognitive PGS was further associated with cognition scores and anorexia in within-sibling analyses, suggesting these results do not solely reflect the effects of assortative mating or passive gene-environment correlations. The cognitive PGS showed significantly stronger associations with cortical volumes than the non-cognitive PGS and was associated with right hemisphere caudal anterior cingulate and pars-orbitalis in within-sibling analyses, while the non-cognitive PGS showed stronger associations with white matter fractional anisotropy and a significant within-sibling association for right superior corticostriate-frontal cortex.
Conclusions
Our findings suggest that PGSs for cognitive and non-cognitive factors show similar associations with cognition and socioeconomic status as well as other psychosocial outcomes, but distinct associations with regional neural phenotypes in this adolescent sample.
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