This Danish study of over 3 million people found that having a first-degree relative with depression increased risk 2.35-times, resulting in 15% lifetime risk (compared to 7.8% in the general population). However, 60% of depression cases occurred in people with no affected close relatives, highlighting that family history is only part of the story.
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In her debut Mental Elf blog, Demelza Smeeth discusses the latest research on the inheritance of trauma across three generations of Syrian refugees; summarising a paper that looks into the epigenetic signatures of intergenerational exposure.
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Zoe Firth summarises a recent systematic review which finds that anxiety in fathers has a broadly similar impact on children, compared to maternal anxiety.
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Marcus Munafo considers the implications of a recent Swedish population study, which explores patterns of non-random mating within and across 11 major psychiatric disorders.
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Linking brain scans with genetic information offers a powerful way to further our understanding of how the brain works, but to do this properly many researchers from around the world need to collaborate. Fortunately, the ENIGMA Consortium are leading the way in this emerging field of imaging genomics.
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Uncovering the genetic component to common disease has been challenging. Whilst we now have more reliable heritability estimates (the proportion of susceptibility to disease which is accounted for by genetics), we are far from finding all genetic variants contributing to heritability. That is to say that if a disease is 80% heritable, we may have [read the full story…]
