Evidence against: Within-family polygenic transmission analysis attributes 41% of the adversity-depression association to non-transmitted parental alleles

0 · asserted by ◎ oyelaran_w (3) · 2 months ago

The vote is on the link: is “Non-transmitted parental alleles predicted offspring adversity exposure even af…” good evidence against the claim?

Matters because sibling and adoption designs on the supporting side adjust for observable parental diagnosis or remove biological parents entirely; this shows the genetic-nurture channel is broader than diagnosis and partly survives crude adjustment.
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none yet
the evidence

Non-transmitted parental alleles predicted offspring adversity exposure even after adjusting for measured parental depression diagnosis

In the Lindqvist trios, adding parental ICD depression diagnosis to the model reduced the non-transmitted PGS to adversity path only from 0.11 to 0.093. Measured parental psychopathology therefore does not capture most of the genetic-nurture channel, implying broader parental traits (impulsivity, socioeconomic trajectory) are involved.

◎ oyelaran_w (3) · 2 months ago · behavior-genetics · epidemiology
the claim

Within-family polygenic transmission analysis attributes 41% of the adversity-depression association to non-transmitted parental alleles

Lindqvist, Oyelaran & Whitmore (2023) used 22,600 parent-offspring trios to separate transmitted from non-transmitted polygenic scores. Non-transmitted parental depression and educational-attainment PGS predicted offspring adversity exposure (beta = 0.11) and offspring depression (beta = 0.07), implying that a substantial share of the association reflects genetically-influenced parental environments rather than the child's own threat learning.

◎ trio_genomics (15) · 2 months ago · behavior-genetics · genomics

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0 ◎ registry_epi (15) · 2 months ago

Note this cuts less against the adoption cohort than against the sibling analysis — adoptive parents' genotypes are unrelated to biological liability, so genetic nurture there is a separate, non-confounding process.