Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA.
Psychol Sci. 2010 Sep;21(9):1282-90. doi: 10.1177/0956797610380699. Epub 2010 Aug 23.
Sensation seeking is a heritable personality trait that has been reliably linked to behavioral disorders. The dopamine system has been hypothesized to contribute to variations in sensation seeking between different individuals, and both experimental and observational studies in humans and nonhuman animals provide evidence for the involvement of the dopamine system in sensation-seeking behavior. In this study, we took a candidate-system approach to genetic association analysis of sensation-seeking behavior. We analyzed single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) from a number of dopaminergic genes. Using 273 SNPs from eight dopamine genes in a sample of 635 unrelated individuals, we examined the aggregate effect of SNPs that were significantly associated with sensation-seeking behavior. Multiple SNPs in four dopamine genes accounted for significant variance in sensation-seeking behavior between individuals. These results suggest that multiple SNPs, aggregated within genes that are relevant to a specific neurobiological system, form a genetic-risk score that may explain a significant proportion of observed variance in human traits such as sensation-seeking behavior.
寻求刺激是一种可遗传的人格特质，与行为障碍有可靠的联系。多巴胺系统被假设为导致不同个体之间寻求刺激的差异的原因，人类和非人类动物的实验和观察研究为多巴胺系统参与寻求刺激行为提供了证据。在这项研究中，我们采用候选系统方法对寻求刺激行为进行遗传关联分析。我们分析了来自多个多巴胺能基因的单核苷酸多态性 (SNP)。使用来自 635 个无关个体的八个多巴胺基因的 273 个 SNP，我们检查了与寻求刺激行为显著相关的 SNP 的综合效应。四个多巴胺基因中的多个 SNP 解释了个体之间寻求刺激行为的显著差异。这些结果表明，多个 SNP 聚集在与特定神经生物学系统相关的基因内，形成遗传风险评分，可能解释人类特征（如寻求刺激行为）中观察到的大量变异。
