Abstract
Similarities between parent and offspring are widespread in psychology; however, shared genetic variants often confound causal inference for offspring outcomes. A polygenic score (PGS) derived from genome-wide association studies (GWAS) can be used to test for the presence of parental influence that controls for genetic variants shared across generations. We use a PGS for educational attainment (EA3; N ≈ 750 thousand) to predict offspring years of education in a sample of 2517 twins and both parents. We find that within families, the dizygotic twin with the higher PGS is more likely to attain higher education (unstandardized β = 0.32; p < 0.001). Additionally, however, we find an effect of parental genotype on offspring outcome that is independent of the offspring’s own genotype; this raises the variance explained in offspring years of education from 9.3 to 11.1% (∆R2 = 0.018, p < 0.001). Controlling for parental IQ or socioeconomic status substantially attenuated or eliminated this effect of parental genotype. These findings suggest a role of environmental factors affected by heritable characteristics of the parents in fostering offspring years of education.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 3896-3904 |
| Number of pages | 9 |
| Journal | Molecular psychiatry |
| Volume | 26 |
| Issue number | 8 |
| Early online date | Aug 23 2019 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Aug 2021 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Funding The research reported here and the preparation of this manuscript were supported by grants from the U.S. National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (AA09367, AA11886), the National Institute of Mental Health (MH066140), and the National Institute on Drug Abuse (DA05147, DA013240).