GWAS of 126,559 Individuals Identifies Genetic Variants Associated with Educational Attainment

By C. A. Rietveld, S. Medland, J. Derringer, Jian Yang, T. Esko, Nicolas W. Martin, H. Westra, K. Shakhbazov, A. Abdellaoui, A. Agrawal and 193 more. Science, 2013

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A genome-wide association study of educational attainment was conducted in a discovery sample of 101,069 individuals and a replication sample of 25,490. Three independent SNPs are genome-wide significant (rs9320913, rs11584700, rs4851266), and all three replicate. Estimated effects sizes are small (R2 ≈ 0.02%), approximately 1 month of schooling per allele. A linear polygenic score from all measured SNPs accounts for ≈ 2% of the variance in both educational attainment and cognitive function. Genes in the region of the loci have previously been associated with health, cognitive, and central nervous system phenotypes, and bioinformatics analyses suggest the involvement of the anterior caudate nucleus. These findings provide promising candidate SNPs for follow-up work, and our effect size estimates can anchor power analyses in social-science genetics.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Genetics, Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3c530df4ddbee85e46221ceb9f20e01b2d27d19b

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Citations in the corpus

Americans overestimate social class mobility (2015, background): “Aswell, decades of gene research, primarily conducted on twins, suggests that there are genetic components to aspects of social class that include educational attainment and occupation status (e.g., Baker, Treloar, Reynolds, Heath, & Martin, 1996; Rietveld et al., 2013; Tambs, Sundet, Magnus, & Berg”
Large-Scale Exome Sequencing Study Implicates Both Developmental and Functional Changes in the Neurobiology of Autism (2019, methodology): “6 We used results from six GWAS datasets: ASD, schizophrenia (SCZ), major depressive disorder 7 (MDD), and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which are all positively genetically 8 correlated with ASD and with each other; educational attainment (EA), which is positively 9 correlated wi”
The nature of nurture: Effects of parental genotypes (2017, background): “Thus, the educational attainment of parents provides an environmental effect for children, but one that has a genetic component (7, 8).”
An Atlas of Genetic Correlations across Human Diseases and Traits (2015, positive): “Three, we estimate a positive genetic correlation between autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and educational attainment (which has very high genetic correlation with IQ [37, 45, 46]).”
Heterogeneity in polygenic scores for common human traits (2017, methodology): “Table 1 details the 434 distinct PGS estimation approaches (24 with no LD trimming + 216 with LD clumping + 192 with LD pruning + 2 top SNPs) we investigated using the SNPs and effect estimates from large published GWAS meta-analysis results where HRS was not present or was removed (9-13).”
Bayesian weighted Mendelian randomization for causal inference based on summary statistics (2018, background): “…127,573 (Jones et al., 2016) Social Trait Insomnia complaints 113,006 (Hammerschlag et al., 2017) Social Trait Educational attainment college 95,429 (Rietveld et al., 2013) Social Trait Educational attainment eduyears 101,069 (Rietveld et al., 2013) Social Trait GPC agreeableness 17,375 (De Moor…”
Bias due to participant overlap in two‐sample Mendelian randomization (2016, methodology): “…schooling (“EduYears”) constructed using five genetic variants associated with EduYears at a genome-wide level of significance (𝑃 5 × 10−8) explained about 0.1% of the variance in EduYears in the discovery sample of 101, 069 individuals (corresponding F statistic = 20.2) (Rietveld et al., 2013).”
Integrative omics for health and disease (2018, background): “…not be amenable to detecting differential uses of these patterns compared with a tissue that is more proximally affected by a disease, such as muscle tissue in muscular dystrophy. for diseases such as cardiovascular disease 77 , as well as for predicting traits such as educational attainment 106 .”
Polygenic Influence on Educational Attainment: New evidence from The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (2015, methodology): “…online supplement), the genetic database included 1,886 individuals with valid data on 940,862 SNPs. Polygenic scores for educational attainment were calculated for each sibling pairs participant using the results of their metaanalysis of the GWAS of educational attainment (Rietveld et al., 2013).”