A large European meta-analysis led by King’s College London has revealed 39 new areas of the genome linked to symptoms of anxiety and provided new estimates of heritability of this common condition.
Writing in Nature Human Behaviour, the researchers explain they found 80 variants linked to anxiety in 74 specific areas of the genome, but 35 were already known to be linked to the disorder from previous research.
“These correlations highlight the interconnection between mental and physical health,” said Brittany Mitchell, PhD, a senior researcher at the QIMR Berghofer medical research institute and co-first author on the study in a press statement.
“Importantly, while some shared genetic variants may increase risk for both a physical health condition and more severe anxiety symptoms, it’s also true that living with chronic pain or illness can contribute to anxiety symptoms. Our findings don’t reveal causation or the direction of effect, but they do open up important questions for future research.”
Anxiety disorders are very common mental health conditions across the globe with large variations in severity from mild to debilitating. Previous research has attempted to assess the genetic heritability of anxiety but estimates of how heritable this condition is vary widely.
In this study, genetic data from 14 cohorts of people with generalized anxiety symptoms assessed via self-report questionnaires between 2007 and 2023 was combined to carry out a large meta-analysis of 693,869 people. Most of the cohorts were largely made up of people of European ancestry, for example, the UK Biobank, and mostly came from Europe or North America.
In addition to finding the new variants, the team also created a polygenic risk score for anxiety aggregating genome-wide SNP effects. Overall, the estimated SNP-based heritability was around 6% and the team estimated that about 1-3% of variance in anxiety symptom severity could be attributed to genetics according to the polygenic risk score.
Notably the research also highlighted some links between the genetics of anxiety and other conditions like irritable bowel syndrome, coronary artery disease, and migraine.
“Given the high and rising rates of anxiety, especially in young adults, it is more important than ever to improve our ability to identify and understand sources of risk,” write the authors.
“Despite its public health impact, progress in anxiety genetics lags behind other major mental health conditions. We hope our findings encourage genome-wide investigations leveraging existing but potentially underutilized anxiety severity data in genotyped cohorts, accelerating our progress in understanding the genetic architecture of anxiety.”
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