Department of Psychiatry, Washington University School of Medicine, Saint Louis, MO, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA.
Behav Genet. 2022 Nov;52(6):315-323. doi: 10.1007/s10519-022-10113-y. Epub 2022 Sep 28.
Previous studies have found significant associations between estimated autozygosity - the proportion of an individual's genome contained in homozygous segments due to distant inbreeding - and multiple traits, including educational attainment (EA) and cognitive ability. In one study, estimated autozygosity showed a stronger association with parental EA than the subject's own EA. This was likely driven by parental EA's association with mobility: more educated parents tended to migrate further from their hometown, and because of the strong correlation between ancestry and geography in the Netherlands, these individuals chose partners farther from their ancestry and therefore more different from them genetically. We examined the associations between estimated autozygosity, cognitive ability, and parental EA in a contemporary sub-sample of adolescents from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study℠ (ABCD Study®) (analytic N = 6,504). We found a negative association between autozygosity and child cognitive ability consistent with previous studies, while the associations between autozygosity and parental EA were in the expected direction of effect (with greater levels of autozygosity being associated with lower EA) but the effect sizes were significantly weaker than those estimated in previous work. We also found a lower mean level of autozygosity in the ABCD sample compared to previous autozygosity studies, which may reflect overall decreasing levels of autozygosity over generations. Variation in spousal similarities in ancestral background in the ABCD study compared to other studies may explain the pattern of associations between estimated autozygosity, EA, and cognitive ability in the current study.
先前的研究发现，个体基因组中由于远交而处于纯合状态的部分（即估计的自同合率）与多种特征之间存在显著关联，包括受教育程度（EA）和认知能力。在一项研究中，与个体自身的 EA 相比，估计的自同合率与父母的 EA 之间的关联更为紧密。这可能是由于父母的 EA 与迁移有关：受教育程度较高的父母往往会远离家乡迁移，而由于荷兰的祖先和地理之间存在强烈的相关性，这些个体选择的伴侣离他们的祖先更远，因此在基因上与他们的差异更大。我们在当代青少年大脑认知发展研究（ABCD 研究）的亚样本中（分析 N=6504），检验了估计的自同合率、认知能力和父母的 EA 之间的关联。我们发现自同合率与儿童认知能力之间存在负相关，这与先前的研究一致，而自同合率与父母的 EA 之间的关联则符合预期的效应方向（自同合率越高，EA 越低），但效应大小明显弱于先前研究中估计的效应大小。我们还发现，与先前的自同合率研究相比，ABCD 样本中的自同合率平均值较低，这可能反映了世代相传中自同合率的总体下降。与其他研究相比，ABCD 研究中配偶在祖先背景方面的相似性的差异可能解释了当前研究中估计的自同合率、EA 和认知能力之间关联的模式。
