Background: Anxiety disorders are prevalent and anxiety symptoms co-occur with many psychiatric disorders. We aimed to identify genomic risk loci associated with anxiety, characterize its genetic architecture, and genetic overlap with psychiatric disorders.
Methods: We used the GWAS of anxiety symptoms, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). We employed MiXeR and LAVA to characterize the genetic architecture and genetic overlap between the phenotypes. Conditional and conjunctional false discovery rate analyses were performed to boost the identification of genomic loci associated with anxiety and those shared with psychiatric disorders. Gene annotation and gene set analyses were conducted using OpenTargets and FUMA, respectively.
Results: Anxiety was polygenic with 12.9k estimated genetic risk variants and overlapped extensively with psychiatric disorders (4.1-11.4k variants). MiXeR and LAVA revealed predominantly positive genetic correlations between anxiety and psychiatric disorders. We identified 114 novel loci for anxiety by conditioning on the psychiatric disorders. We also identified loci shared between anxiety and major depression ( n = 47), bipolar disorder ( n = 33), schizophrenia ( n = 71), and ADHD ( n = 20). Genes annotated to anxiety loci exhibit enrichment for a broader range of biological pathways and differential tissue expression in more diverse tissues than those annotated to the shared loci.
Conclusions: Anxiety is a highly polygenic phenotype with extensive genetic overlap with psychiatric disorders. These genetic overlaps enabled the identification of novel loci for anxiety. The shared genetic architecture may underlie the extensive cross-disorder comorbidity of anxiety, and the identified genetic loci implicate molecular pathways that may lead to potential drug targets.
Competing Interests: Competing interests Ole A. Andreassen is a consultant for Cortechs.ai and Precision Health, and has received speaker’s honoraria from Lundbeck, Janssen, Otsuka and Sunovion. Srdjan Djurovic has received speaker’s honoraria from Lundbeck. Anders M. Dale was a Founder of and holds equity in CorTechs Labs, Inc, and serves on its Scientific Advisory Board. He is also a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of Human Longevity, Inc. (HLI), and the Mohn Medical Imaging and Visualization Centre in Bergen, Norway. He receives funding through a research agreement with General Electric Healthcare (GEHC). The terms of these arrangements have been reviewed and approved by the University of California, San Diego in accordance with its conflict-of-interest policies. The other authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.