The Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King's College London, Denmark Hill, London, SE5 8AF, UK.
Department of Psychology, Åbo Akademi University, Åbo, Finland.
Arch Sex Behav. 2020 Oct;49(7):2497-2510. doi: 10.1007/s10508-020-01696-w. Epub 2020 Apr 19.
Increased risky sexual behavior in sexual minorities relative to heterosexual individuals may be partly explained by mental health disparities, and both factors may be further jointly influenced by common genetic and environmental factors. However, these relationships have not been previously investigated. The objectives of the present study were to investigate mental health disparities as a mediator of the relationship between sexual orientation and risky sexual behavior, controlling for genetic and environmental effects in this relationship and testing for sex differences. Participants included 5814 twins from a Finnish twin cohort. Specified latent factors included sexual orientation, mental health indicators, and risky sexual behavior. Twin models were fitted to the factor structure of the data whereby a Cholesky decomposition on the factors was compared to a mediation submodel using OpenMx. Sex differences were tested in the final model. Phenotypically, mental health disparities partially mediated the relationship between sexual orientation and increased risky sexual behavior, with comparable effects in males and females. However, while this indirect route from sexual orientation to risky sexual behavior mainly contained transmitted genetic effects in males, there was a significant proportion of transmitted shared environmental effects in females. This is the first study to demonstrate that the mediation relationships between sexual orientation, mental health disparities, and risky sexual behavior are not confounded by genetic and environmental factors. The significant sex differences need to be recognized in future research and intervention design to improve sexual health in sexual minorities.
性少数群体相对于异性恋个体的风险性行为增加，部分原因可能是心理健康差异，而这两个因素可能受到共同的遗传和环境因素的进一步共同影响。然而，这些关系以前并未被研究过。本研究的目的是调查心理健康差异是否是性取向与风险性行为之间关系的中介，控制了该关系中的遗传和环境影响，并检验了性别差异。参与者包括来自芬兰双胞胎队列的 5814 对双胞胎。指定的潜在因素包括性取向、心理健康指标和风险性行为。使用 OpenMx 对数据的因子结构进行了双胞胎模型拟合，其中对因子进行了 Cholesky 分解，并与中介子模型进行了比较。在最终模型中测试了性别差异。表型上，心理健康差异部分中介了性取向与增加风险性行为之间的关系，男性和女性的影响相当。然而，虽然这种从性取向到风险性行为的间接途径主要包含男性的遗传传递效应，但女性中存在显著比例的遗传共享环境效应。这是第一项证明性取向、心理健康差异和风险性行为之间的中介关系不受遗传和环境因素混淆的研究。未来的研究和干预设计需要认识到这些显著的性别差异，以改善性少数群体的性健康。
