Department of Psychology, University of Pittsburgh.
Department of Genetics, University of Pennsylvania.
J Abnorm Psychol. 2018 Feb;127(2):216-227. doi: 10.1037/abn0000326.
Although cognition is one of the most important predictors of community functioning in schizophrenia, little is known about the causes of this correlation. To our knowledge, this study is the first to examine the extent to which this correlation is genetically mediated and whether the genetic correlation is specific to schizophrenia. Six hundred thirty-six participants from 43 multigenerational families with at least two relatives with schizophrenia and 135 unrelated controls underwent diagnostic interview and cognition and functioning assessment. Quantitative genetic analyses were conducted using maximum-likelihood variance decomposition methods implemented in SOLAR (Almasy & Blangero, 1998). Among patients with schizophrenia, cognition and community functioning were positively correlated and genetic effects shared between them were significant contributors to this relationship whereas environmental effects shared between them were not. In contrast, genetic effects were not shared significantly between cognition in depressed or nondiagnosed relatives and community functioning in schizophrenia. In all analyses, the contributions of social cognition to community functioning were accounted for by general cognition. These findings support heritable factors that contribute to the correlation between cognition and community functioning that are relatively specific to schizophrenia and are not significantly shared with depression or a lack of psychopathology. This suggests the possibility of identifying specific genetic variants that contribute to this correlation and to these important individual differences among schizophrenia patients. (PsycINFO Database Record
虽然认知是精神分裂症患者社区功能的最重要预测因素之一，但对于这种相关性的原因知之甚少。据我们所知，这项研究首次检验了这种相关性在多大程度上是由遗传介导的，以及遗传相关性是否专门针对精神分裂症。636 名来自 43 个多代家庭的参与者，这些家庭中有至少 2 名亲属患有精神分裂症，还有 135 名无关对照，他们接受了诊断访谈以及认知和功能评估。使用 SOLAR（Almasy 和 Blangero，1998）中实施的最大似然方差分解方法进行了定量遗传分析。在精神分裂症患者中，认知和社区功能呈正相关，遗传效应在两者之间有显著的共同作用，而环境效应在两者之间没有共同作用。相比之下，认知在抑郁或未诊断的亲属与精神分裂症的社区功能之间，遗传效应没有显著的共同作用。在所有分析中，一般认知解释了社会认知对社区功能的贡献。这些发现支持了遗传因素对认知和社区功能之间相关性的贡献，这种相关性相对专门针对精神分裂症，而与抑郁或缺乏精神病理学没有显著的共同作用。这表明有可能确定特定的遗传变异，这些遗传变异有助于这种相关性以及精神分裂症患者之间的这些重要个体差异。
