Schizophrenia liability shares common molecular genetic risk factors with sleep duration and nightmares in childhood

Reed, Zoe E., Jones, Hannah J., Hemani, Gibran, Zammit, Stanley ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2647-9211 and Davis, Oliver S. P. 2019. Schizophrenia liability shares common molecular genetic risk factors with sleep duration and nightmares in childhood. Wellcome Open Research 4 , 15. 10.12688/wellcomeopenres.15060.1

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Abstract

Background: Sleep abnormalities are common in schizophrenia, often appearing before psychosis onset; however, the mechanisms behind this are uncertain. We investigated whether genetic risk for schizophrenia is associated with sleep phenotypes. Methods: We used data from 6,058 children and 2,302 mothers from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC). We examined associations between a polygenic risk score for schizophrenia and sleep duration in both children and mothers, and nightmares in children, along with genetic covariances between these traits. Results: Polygenic risk for schizophrenia was associated with increased risk of nightmares (OR=1.07, 95% CI: 1.01, 1.14, p=0.02) in children, and also with less sleep (β=-44.52, 95% CI: −88.98, −0.07; p=0.05). We observed a similar relationship with sleep duration in mothers, although evidence was much weaker (p=0.38). Finally, we found evidence of genetic covariance between schizophrenia risk and reduced sleep duration in children and mothers, and between schizophrenia risk and nightmares in children. Conclusions: These molecular genetic results support recent findings from twin analysis that show genetic overlap between sleep disturbances and psychotic-like experiences. They also show, to our knowledge for the first time, a genetic correlation between schizophrenia liability and risk of nightmares in childhood.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	MRC Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics (CNGG) Medicine
Publisher:	F1000Research
ISSN:	2398-502X
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	30 January 2019
Date of Acceptance:	25 January 2019
Last Modified:	05 May 2023 09:54
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/119030

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