CORE-Copenhagen Research Centre for Mental Health, Mental Health Centre Copenhagen, Copenhagen University Hospital, Copenhagen, Denmark.
The Lundbeck Foundation Initiative for Integrative Psychiatric Research (iPSYCH), Aarhus, Denmark.
Epidemiol Infect. 2023 May 18;151:e93. doi: 10.1017/S0950268823000687.
Severe infections and psychiatric disorders have a large impact on both society and the individual. Studies investigating these conditions and the links between them are therefore important. Most past studies have focused on binary phenotypes of particular infections or overall infection, thereby losing some information regarding susceptibility to infection as reflected in the number of specific infection types, or sites, which we term infection load. In this study we found that infection load was associated with increased risk for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, autism spectrum disorder, bipolar disorder, depression, schizophrenia and overall psychiatric diagnosis. We obtained a modest but significant heritability for infection load ( = 0.0221), and a high degree of genetic correlation between it and overall psychiatric diagnosis ( = 0.4298). We also found evidence supporting a genetic causality for overall infection on overall psychiatric diagnosis. Our genome-wide association study for infection load identified 138 suggestive associations. Our study provides further evidence for genetic links between susceptibility to infection and psychiatric disorders, and suggests that a higher infection load may have a cumulative association with psychiatric disorders, beyond what has been described for individual infections.
严重感染和精神疾病对社会和个人都有很大的影响。因此，研究这些疾病及其之间的联系非常重要。大多数过去的研究都集中在特定感染或整体感染的二元表型上，从而失去了一些关于感染易感性的信息，这种易感性反映在特定感染类型或部位的数量上，我们称之为感染负荷。在这项研究中，我们发现感染负荷与注意力缺陷/多动障碍、自闭症谱系障碍、双相情感障碍、抑郁症、精神分裂症和整体精神诊断的风险增加有关。我们发现感染负荷具有适度但显著的遗传力（ = 0.0221），并且它与整体精神诊断之间具有高度的遗传相关性（ = 0.4298）。我们还发现了支持整体感染对整体精神诊断具有遗传因果关系的证据。我们对感染负荷的全基因组关联研究确定了 138 个提示性关联。我们的研究为感染易感性和精神疾病之间的遗传联系提供了进一步的证据，并表明更高的感染负荷可能与精神疾病存在累积关联，超出了对个别感染的描述。
