showing 13 related works from this author
Genetic association study of childhood aggression across raters, instruments, and age
2021
AbstractChildhood aggressive behavior (AGG) has a substantial heritability of around 50%. Here we present a genome-wide association meta-analysis (GWAMA) of childhood AGG, in which all phenotype measures across childhood ages from multiple assessors were included. We analyzed phenotype assessments for a total of 328 935 observations from 87 485 children aged between 1.5 and 18 years, while accounting for sample overlap. We also meta-analyzed within subsets of the data, i.e., within rater, instrument and age. SNP-heritability for the overall meta-analysis (AGGoverall) was 3.31% (SE = 0.0038). We found no genome-wide significant SNPs for AGGoverall. The gene-based analysis returned three sign…
Childhood aggression and the co-occurrence of behavioural and emotional problems: results across ages 3–16 years from multiple raters in six cohorts …
2018
Childhood aggression and its resulting consequences inflict a huge burden on affected children, their relatives, teachers, peers and society as a whole. Aggression during childhood rarely occurs in isolation and is correlated with other symptoms of childhood psychopathology. In this paper, we aim to describe and improve the understanding of the co-occurrence of aggression with other forms of childhood psychopathology. We focus on the co-occurrence of aggression and other childhood behavioural and emotional problems, including other externalising problems, attention problems and anxiety-depression. The data were brought together within the EU-ACTION (Aggression in Children: unravelling gene-…
DSM-IV Combined Type ADHD Shows Familial Association With Sibling Trait Scores
2008
Contains fulltext : 69060.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access) Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a discrete clinical syndrome characterized by the triad of inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity in the context of marked impairments. Molecular genetic studies have been successful in identifying genetic variants associated with ADHD, particularly with DSM-IV inattentive and combined subtypes. Quantitative trait locus (QTL) approaches to linkage and association mapping have yet to be widely used in ADHD research, although twin studies investigating individual differences suggest that genetic liability for ADHD is continuously distributed throughout the population, u…
Longitudinal heritability of childhood aggression
2016
The genetic and environmental contributions to the variation and longitudinal stability in childhood aggressive behavior were assessed in two large twin cohorts, the Netherlands Twin Register (NTR), and the Twins Early Development Study (TEDS; United Kingdom). In NTR, maternal ratings on aggression from the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) were available for 10,765 twin pairs at age 7, for 8,557 twin pairs at age 9/10, and for 7,176 twin pairs at age 12. In TEDS, parental ratings of conduct disorder from the Strength and Difficulty Questionnaire (SDQ) were available for 6,897 twin pairs at age 7, for 3,028 twin pairs at age 9 and for 5,716 twin pairs at age 12. In both studies, stability and…
Novel loci for childhood body mass index and shared heritability with adult cardiometabolic traits
2020
The genetic background of childhood body mass index (BMI), and the extent to which the well-known associations of childhood BMI with adult diseases are explained by shared genetic factors, are largely unknown. We performed a genome-wide association study meta-analysis of BMI in 61,111 children aged between 2 and 10 years. Twenty-five independent loci reached genome-wide significance in the combined discovery and replication analyses. Two of these, located nearNEDD4LandSLC45A3, have not previously been reported in relation to either childhood or adult BMI. Positive genetic correlations of childhood BMI with birth weight and adult BMI, waist-to-hip ratio, diastolic blood pressure and type 2 d…
Genetic risk and a primary role for cell-mediated immune mechanisms in multiple sclerosis.
2011
Multiple sclerosis is a common disease of the central nervous system in which the interplay between inflammatory and neurodegenerative processes typically results in intermittent neurological disturbance followed by progressive accumulation of disability. Epidemiological studies have shown that genetic factors are primarily responsible for the substantially increased frequency of the disease seen in the relatives of affected individuals, and systematic attempts to identify linkage in multiplex families have confirmed that variation within the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) exerts the greatest individual effect on risk. Modestly powered genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have ena…
Assessing Reliability, Heritability and General Cognitive Ability in a Battery of Cognitive Tasks for Laboratory Mice
2005
This report includes the first sibling study of mouse behavior, and presents evidence for a heritable general cognitive ability (g) factor influencing cognitive batteries. Data from a population of male and female outbred mice (n = 84), and a replication study of male sibling pairs (n = 167) are reported. Arenas employed were the T-maze, the Morris water maze, the puzzle box, the Hebb-Williams maze, object exploration, a water plus-maze, and a second food-puzzle arena. The results show a factor structure consistent with the presence of g in mice. Employing one score per arena, this factor accounts for 41% of the variance in the first study (or 36% after sex regression) and 23% in the second…
Evidence for general cognitive ability (g ) in heterogeneous stock mice and an analysis of potential confounds
2002
The heterogeneous stock (HS) is a genetically outbred line of mice established more than 30 years ago from an 8-way cross of C57BL/6, BALB/c, RIII, AKR, DBA/2, I, A/J and C3H inbred mouse strains. The present study compared the performance of 40 HS mice across a battery of diverse cognitive tasks under a variety of motivations. Indices of emotionality were also included in order to assess their influence on performance. All measures of ability loaded positively on an unrotated first principal component that accounted for 31% of the variance, suggesting the presence of a common factor of general cognitive ability (g) underlying all tasks. A first factor derived from anxiety indices correlate…
Harmonizing behavioral outcomes across studies, raters, and countries: application to the genetic analysis of aggression in the ACTION Consortium
2020
BACKGROUND: Aggression in children has genetic and environmental causes. Studies of aggression can pool existing datasets to include more complex models of social effects. Such analyses require large datasets with harmonized outcome measures. Here, we made use of a reference panel for phenotype data to harmonize multiple aggression measures in school-aged children to jointly analyze data from five large twin cohorts.METHODS: Individual level aggression data on 86,559 children (42,468 twin pairs) were available in five European twin cohorts measured by different instruments. A phenotypic reference panel was collected which enabled a model-based phenotype harmonization approach. A bi-factor i…
Higher aggression is related to poorer academic performance in compulsory education
2019
Background To conduct a comprehensive assessment of the association between aggression and academic performance in compulsory education. Method We studied aggression and academic performance in over 27,000 individuals from four European twin cohorts participating in the ACTION consortium (Aggression in Children: Unraveling gene‐environment interplay to inform Treatment and InterventiON strategies). Individual level data on aggression at ages 7–16 were assessed by three instruments (Achenbach System of Empirically Based Assessment, Multidimensional Peer Nomination Inventory, Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire) including parental, teacher and self‐reports. Academic performance was measu…
Genome-wide association analyses of individual differences in quantitatively assessed reading- and language-related skills in up to 34,000 people
2021
AbstractThe use of spoken and written language is a capacity that is unique to humans. Individual differences in reading- and language-related skills are influenced by genetic variation, with twin-based heritability estimates of 30-80%, depending on the trait. The relevant genetic architecture is complex, heterogeneous, and multifactorial, and yet to be investigated with well-powered studies. Here, we present a multicohort genome-wide association study (GWAS) of five traits assessed individually using psychometric measures: word reading, nonword reading, spelling, phoneme awareness, and nonword repetition, with total sample sizes ranging from 13,633 to 33,959 participants aged 5-26 years (1…
Teacher-rated aggression and co-occurring behaviors and problems among schoolchildren: A comparison of four population-based European cohorts
2019
AbstractAggressive behavior in school is an ongoing concern, with the current focus mostly on specific manifestations such as bullying and extreme violence. Children spend a substantial amount of time in school, but their behaviors in the school setting tend to be less well characterized than in the home setting. Since aggression may index multiple behavioral problems, we assessed associations of teacher-rated aggressive behavior with co-occurring externalizing/internalizing problems and social behavior in 39,936 schoolchildren from 4 population-based cohorts from Finland, the Netherlands, and the UK. Mean levels of aggressive behavior differed significantly by gender. Correlations of aggre…
Childhood gene-environment interactions and age-dependent effects of genetic variants associated with refractive error and myopia: The CREAM Consorti…
2018
Myopia, currently at epidemic levels in East Asia, is a leading cause of untreatable visual impairment. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) in adults have identified 39 loci associated with refractive error and myopia. Here, the age-of-onset of association between genetic variants at these 39 loci and refractive error was investigated in 5200 children assessed longitudinally across ages 7-15 years, along with gene-environment interactions involving the major environmental risk-factors, nearwork and time outdoors. Specific variants could be categorized as showing evidence of: (a) early-onset effects remaining stable through childhood, (b) early-onset effects that progressed further with i…