Polygenic prediction of school performance in children with and without psychiatric disorders

Abstract

Individuals with psychiatric disorders perform differently in school compared to the general population. Both genetic and environmental factors contribute to such differences. Existing studies on the association of educational attainment polygenic score (EA-PGS) with school performance were based on individuals from the general population and it is unclear if the results can be generalized to individuals with psychiatric disorders. We studied the association of EA-PGS with school performance in 30,982 individuals of whom ~60% were diagnosed with at least one major psychiatric disorder. Comparing the results between individuals with and without psychiatric disorders, we found that the associations of EA-PGS with school performance were weaker in individuals with psychiatric disorders than in those without the disorders; the largest differences were seen in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We further studied the associations of family socio-economic variables (parents’ education and employment) with school performance and found weaker associations in individuals with psychiatric disorders than in those without the disorders. Overall our analyses suggest that results from studies on the associations of genetic and environmental factors with school performance in the general population cannot be fully generalized to individuals with psychiatric disorders.

The association between polygenic scores for attention‐deficit/hyperactivity disorder and school performance: The role of attention‐deficit/hyperactivity disorder symptoms, polygenic scores for educational attainment, and shared familial factors

“…Still, compared to the LR analyses, the crude IV association with the practical subject category was almost half of that in other categories (Figure 2B , Figure S4 for individual subjects). One explanation may be pleiotropic influences from genetic factors on different school subjects (Rimfeld et al., 2015 ) and the positive correlation between PGS for EA and a latent factor of school performance (Rajagopal et al., 2020 ). Hypothetically, the IV analysis decreases the sensitivity of the PGS towards this latent factor, and increases specificity towards polygenic influences from ADHD to school performance.…”