Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • Article
  • Published:

A major role for common genetic variation in anxiety disorders

Molecular Psychiatry volume 25, pages 3292–3303 (2020)Cite this article

Subjects

Abstract

Anxiety disorders are common, complex psychiatric disorders with twin heritabilities of 30–60%. We conducted a genome-wide association study of Lifetime Anxiety Disorder (ncase = 25 453, ncontrol = 58 113) and an additional analysis of Current Anxiety Symptoms (ncase = 19 012, ncontrol = 58 113). The liability scale common variant heritability estimate for Lifetime Anxiety Disorder was 26%, and for Current Anxiety Symptoms was 31%. Five novel genome-wide significant loci were identified including an intergenic region on chromosome 9 that has previously been associated with neuroticism, and a locus overlapping the BDNF receptor gene, NTRK2. Anxiety showed significant positive genetic correlations with depression and insomnia as well as coronary artery disease, mirroring findings from epidemiological studies. We conclude that common genetic variation accounts for a substantive proportion of the genetic architecture underlying anxiety.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Access options

Buy this article

  • Purchase on Springer Link
  • Instant access to full article PDF
Buy now

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Kessler RC, Aguilar-Gaxiola S, Alonso J, Chatterji S, Lee S, Ormel J, et al. The global burden of mental disorders: an update from the WHO World Mental Health (WMH) surveys. Epidemiol Psichiatr Soc. 2009;18:23–33.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  2. Wittchen H-U, Jacobi F. Size and burden of mental disorders in Europe–a critical review and appraisal of 27 studies. Eur Neuropsychopharmacol. 2005;15:357–76.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  3. GBD 2017 Disease and Injury Incidence and Prevalence Collaborators. Global, regional, and national incidence, prevalence, and years lived with disability for 354 diseases and injuries for 195 countries and territories, 1990–2017: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2017. Lancet. 2018;392:1789–858.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Polderman TJC, Benyamin B, de Leeuw CA, Sullivan PF, van Bochoven A, Visscher PM, et al. Meta-analysis of the heritability of human traits based on fifty years of twin studies. Nat Genet. 2015;47:702–9.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  5. Craske MG, Stein MB, Eley TC, Milad MR, Holmes A, Rapee RM, et al. Anxiety disorders. Nat Rev Dis Prim. 2017;3:17024.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  6. Smoller JW. The genetics of stress-related disorders: PTSD, depression, and anxiety disorders. Neuropsychopharmacology. 2016;41:297–319.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  7. Ripke S, O’Dushlaine C, Chambert K, Moran JL, Kähler AK, Akterin S, et al. Genome-wide association analysis identifies 13 new risk loci for schizophrenia. Nat Genet. 2013;45:1150–9.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  8. Wray NR, Ripke S, Mattheisen M, Trzaskowski M, Byrne EM, Abdellaoui A, et al. Genome-wide association analyses identify 44 risk variants and refine the genetic architecture of major depression. Nat Genet. 2018;50:668–81.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  9. Dunn EC, Sofer T, Gallo LC, Gogarten SM, Kerr KF, Chen C-Y, et al. Genome-wide association study of generalized anxiety symptoms in the Hispanic Community Health Study/Study of Latinos. Am J Med Genet B, Neuropsychiatr Genet. 2017;174:132–43.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Otowa T, Hek K, Lee M, Byrne EM, Mirza SS, Nivard MG, et al. Meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies of anxiety disorders. Mol Psychiatry. 2016;21:1391–9.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  11. Craske MG, Rauch SL, Ursano R, Prenoveau J, Pine DS, Zinbarg RE. What is an anxiety disorder? Depress Anxiety. 2009;26:1066–85.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  12. Waszczuk MA, Zavos HMS, Gregory AM, Eley TC. The phenotypic and genetic structure of depression and anxiety disorder symptoms in childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. JAMA Psychiatry. 2014;71:905–16.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  13. Roberson-Nay R, Eaves LJ, Hettema JM, Kendler KS, Silberg JL. Childhood separation anxiety disorder and adult onset panic attacks share a common genetic diathesis. Depress Anxiety. 2012;29:320–7.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  14. Hettema JM, Prescott CA, Myers JM, Neale MC, Kendler KS. The structure of genetic and environmental risk factors for anxiety disorders in men and women. Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2005;62:182–9.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  15. Tambs K, Czajkowsky N, Røysamb E, Neale MC, Reichborn-Kjennerud T, Aggen SH, et al. Structure of genetic and environmental risk factors for dimensional representations of DSM-IV anxiety disorders. Br J Psychiatry. 2009;195:301–7.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  16. Mackintosh M-A, Gatz M, Wetherell JL, Pedersen NL. A twin study of lifetime Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) in older adults: genetic and environmental influences shared by neuroticism and GAD. Twin Res Hum Genet. 2006;9:30–7.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  17. Hettema JM, Prescott CA, Kendler KS. Genetic and environmental sources of covariation between generalized anxiety disorder and neuroticism. Am J Psychiatry. 2004;161:1581–7.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  18. Hettema JM, Neale MC, Myers JM, Prescott CA, Kendler KS. A population-based twin study of the relationship between neuroticism and internalizing disorders. Am J Psychiatry. 2006;163:857–64.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  19. Bienvenu OJ, Hettema JM, Neale MC, Prescott CA, Kendler KS. Low extraversion and high neuroticism as indices of genetic and environmental risk for social phobia, agoraphobia, and animal phobia. Am J Psychiatry. 2007;164:1714–21.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  20. Plomin R, Haworth CMA, Davis OSP. Common disorders are quantitative traits. Nat Rev Genet. 2009;10:872–8.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  21. McGrath LM, Weill S, Robinson EB, Macrae R, Smoller JW. Bringing a developmental perspective to anxiety genetics. Dev Psychopathol. 2012;24:1179–93.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  22. Davies MN, Verdi S, Burri A, Trzaskowski M, Lee M, Hettema JM, et al. Generalised anxiety disorder—a twin study of genetic architecture, genome-wide association and differential gene expression. PLoS One. 2015;10:e0134865.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  CAS  Google Scholar 

  23. Pedersen CB, Bybjerg-Grauholm J, Pedersen MG, Grove J, Agerbo E, Bækvad-Hansen M, et al. The iPSYCH2012 case-cohort sample: new directions for unravelling genetic and environmental architectures of severe mental disorders. Mol Psychiatry. 2018;23:6–14.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  24. Davis KAS, Coleman JRI, Adams M, Allen N, Breen G, Cullen B, et al. Mental health in UK Biobank: development, implementation and results from an online questionnaire completed by 157 366 participants. BJPsych Open. 2018;4:83–90.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  25. Kessler RC, Andrews G, Mroczek D, Ustun B, Wittchen H-U. The World Health Organization Composite International Diagnostic Interview short-form (CIDI-SF). Int J Methods Psychiatr Res. 1998;7:171–85.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. McLean CP, Asnaani A, Litz BT, Hofmann SG. Gender differences in anxiety disorders: prevalence, course of illness, comorbidity and burden of illness. J Psychiatr Res. 2011;45:1027–35.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  27. Spitzer RL, Kroenke K, Williams JBW, Löwe B. A brief measure for assessing generalized anxiety disorder: the GAD-7. Arch Intern Med. 2006;166:1092–7.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  28. Meier S, Trontti K, Als TD, Laine M, Pedersen MG, Bybjerg-Grauholm J et al. Genome-wide Association Study of Anxiety and Stress-related Disorders in the iPSYCH Cohort. BioRxiv 2018. https://doi.org/10.1101/263855.

  29. Bycroft C, Freeman C, Petkova D, Band G, Elliott LT, Sharp K et al. Genome-wide genetic data on ~500,000 UK Biobank participants. BioRxiv 2017. https://doi.org/10.1101/166298.

  30. R Foundation for Statistical Computing RCT. R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. Vienna; 2017.

  31. Loh P-R, Tucker G, Bulik-Sullivan BK, Vilhjálmsson BJ, Finucane HK, Salem RM, et al. Efficient Bayesian mixed-model analysis increases association power in large cohorts. Nat Genet. 2015;47:284–90.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  32. Bulik-Sullivan BK, Loh P-R, Finucane HK, Ripke S, Yang J, Schizophrenia Working Group of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium. et al. LD Score regression distinguishes confounding from polygenicity in genome-wide association studies. Nat Genet. 2015;47:291–5.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  33. Rapid GWAS of thousands of phenotypes for 337,000 samples in the UK Biobank—Neale lab. http://www.nealelab.is/blog/2017/7/19/rapid-gwas-of-thousands-of-phenotypes-for-337000-samples-in-the-uk-biobank. Accessed 18 Jul 2019.

  34. Zheng J, Erzurumluoglu AM, Elsworth BL, Kemp JP, Howe L, Haycock PC, et al. LD Hub: a centralized database and web interface to perform LD score regression that maximizes the potential of summary level GWAS data for SNP heritability and genetic correlation analysis. Bioinformatics. 2017;33:272–9.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  35. Details and considerations of the UK Biobank GWAS — Neale lab. http://www.nealelab.is/blog/2017/9/11/details-and-considerations-of-the-uk-biobank-gwas. Accessed 18 Jul 2019.

  36. de Leeuw CA, Mooij JM, Heskes T, Posthuma D. MAGMA: generalized gene-set analysis of GWAS data. PLoS Comput Biol. 2015;11:e1004219.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  CAS  Google Scholar 

  37. Chang CC, Chow CC, Tellier LC, Vattikuti S, Purcell SM, Lee JJ. Second-generation PLINK: rising to the challenge of larger and richer datasets. Gigascience. 2015;4:7.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  CAS  Google Scholar 

  38. Willer CJ, Li Y, Abecasis GR. METAL: fast and efficient meta-analysis of genomewide association scans. Bioinformatics. 2010;26:2190–1.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  39. Evangelou E, Ioannidis JPA. Meta-analysis methods for genome-wide association studies and beyond. Nat Rev Genet. 2013;14:379–89.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  40. Machiela MJ, Chanock SJ. LDlink: a web-based application for exploring population-specific haplotype structure and linking correlated alleles of possible functional variants. Bioinformatics. 2015;31:3555–7.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  41. International Schizophrenia Consortium, Purcell SM, Wray NR, Stone JL, Visscher PM, O’Donovan MC, et al. Common polygenic variation contributes to risk of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Nature. 2009;460:748–52.

    Article  PubMed Central  CAS  Google Scholar 

  42. Okbay A, Baselmans BML, De Neve J-E, Turley P, Nivard MG, Fontana MA, et al. Genetic variants associated with subjective well-being, depressive symptoms, and neuroticism identified through genome-wide analyses. Nat Genet. 2016;48:624–33.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  43. Smith DJ, Escott-Price V, Davies G, Bailey MES, Colodro-Conde L, Ward J, et al. Genome-wide analysis of over 106 000 individuals identifies 9 neuroticism-associated loci. Mol Psychiatry. 2016;21:749–57.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  44. Spalek K, Coynel D, Freytag V, Hartmann F, Heck A, Milnik A, et al. A common NTRK2 variant is associated with emotional arousal and brain white-matter integrity in healthy young subjects. Transl Psychiatry. 2016;6:e758.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  45. Correia CT, Coutinho AM, Sequeira AF, Sousa IG, Lourenço Venda L, Almeida JP, et al. Increased BDNF levels and NTRK2 gene association suggest a disruption of BDNF/TrkB signaling in autism. Genes Brain Behav. 2010;9:841–8.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  46. Kohli MA, Salyakina D, Pfennig A, Lucae S, Horstmann S, Menke A, et al. Association of genetic variants in the neurotrophic receptor-encoding gene NTRK2 and a lifetime history of suicide attempts in depressed patients. Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2010;67:348–59.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  47. Murphy TM, Ryan M, Foster T, Kelly C, McClelland R, O’Grady J, et al. Risk and protective genetic variants in suicidal behaviour: association with SLC1A2, SLC1A3, 5-HTR1B &NTRK2 polymorphisms. Behav Brain Funct. 2011;7:22.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  48. Torres CM, Siebert M, Bock H, Mota SM, Castan JU, Scornavacca F, et al. Tyrosine receptor kinase B gene variants (NTRK2 variants) are associated with depressive disorders in temporal lobe epilepsy. Epilepsy Behav. 2017;71:65–72.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  49. Chen Z-Y, Jing D, Bath KG, Ieraci A, Khan T, Siao C-J, et al. Genetic variant BDNF (Val66Met) polymorphism alters anxiety-related behavior. Science. 2006;314:140–3.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  50. Dong C, Wong ML, Licinio J. Sequence variations of ABCB1, SLC6A2, SLC6A3, SLC6A4, CREB1, CRHR1 and NTRK2: association with major depression and antidepressant response in Mexican-Americans. Mol Psychiatry. 2009;14:1105–18.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  51. Wang Z, Fan J, Gao K, Li Z, Yi Z, Wang L, et al. Neurotrophic tyrosine kinase receptor type 2 (NTRK2) gene associated with treatment response to mood stabilizers in patients with bipolar I disorder. J Mol Neurosci. 2013;50:305–10.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  52. Xu K, Anderson TR, Neyer KM, Lamparella N, Jenkins G, Zhou Z, et al. Nucleotide sequence variation within the human tyrosine kinase B neurotrophin receptor gene: association with antisocial alcohol dependence. Pharmacogenomics J. 2007;7:368–79.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  53. Howard DM, Adams MJ, Shirali M, Clarke T-K, Marioni RE, Davies G et al. Genome-wide association study of depression phenotypes in UK Biobank (n = 322,580) identifies the enrichment of variants in excitatory synaptic pathways. BioRxiv 2017. https://doi.org/10.1101/168732.

  54. van der Harst P, Verweij N. Identification of 64 novel genetic loci provides an expanded view on the genetic architecture of coronary artery disease. Circ Res. 2018;122:433–43.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  CAS  Google Scholar 

  55. Gallagher MD, Posavi M, Huang P, Unger TL, Berlyand Y, Gruenewald AL, et al. A dementia-associated risk variant near TMEM106B alters chromatin architecture and gene expression. Am J Hum Genet. 2017;101:643–63.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  56. Jing H, Hao Y, Bi Q, Zhang J, Yang P. Intra-amygdala microinjection of TNF-α impairs the auditory fear conditioning of rats via glutamate toxicity. Neurosci Res. 2015;91:34–40.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  57. Hettema JM, An SS, Neale MC, Bukszar J, van den OordEJCG, Kendler KS, et al. Association between glutamic acid decarboxylase genes and anxiety disorders, major depression, and neuroticism. Mol Psychiatry. 2006;11:752–62.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  58. Möhler H. The GABA system in anxiety and depression and its therapeutic potential. Neuropharmacology. 2012;62:42–53.

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  59. Farach FJ, Pruitt LD, Jun JJ, Jerud AB, Zoellner LA, Roy-Byrne PP. Pharmacological treatment of anxiety disorders: current treatments and future directions. J Anxiety Disord. 2012;26:833–43.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  60. Sullivan PF, Agrawal A, Bulik CM, Andreassen OA, Børglum AD, Breen G, et al. Psychiatric genomics: an update and an agenda. Am J Psychiatry. 2018;175:15–27.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  61. Hirschfeld RMA. The comorbidity of major depression and anxiety disorders: recognition and management in primary care. Prim Care Companion J Clin Psychiatry. 2001;3:244–54.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  62. Cohen BE, Edmondson D, Kronish IM. State of the art review: depression, stress, anxiety, and cardiovascular disease. Am J Hypertens. 2015;28:1295–302.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  63. Carney RM, Freedland KE. Depression and coronary heart disease. Nat Rev Cardiol. 2017;14:145–55.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  64. Bulik-Sullivan B, Finucane HK, Anttila V, Gusev A, Day FR, Loh P-R, et al. An atlas of genetic correlations across human diseases and traits. Nat Genet. 2015;47:1236–41.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  65. Kraft P. Curses–winner’s and otherwise–in genetic epidemiology. Epidemiology. 2008;19:649–51. discussion 657.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  66. Martin AR, Gignoux CR, Walters RK, Wojcik GL, Neale BM, Gravel S, et al. Human demographic history impacts genetic risk prediction across diverse populations. Am J Hum Genet. 2017;100:635–49.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  67. Fry A, Littlejohns TJ, Sudlow C, Doherty N, Adamska L, Sprosen T, et al. Comparison of sociodemographic and health-related characteristics of UK biobank participants with those of the general population. Am J Epidemiol. 2017;186:1026–34.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  68. Huffman JE. Examining the current standards for genetic discovery and replication in the era of mega-biobanks. Nat Commun. 2018;9:5054.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

This research has been conducted using the UK Biobank Resource, under application 16577. This study represents independent research part funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Biomedical Research Centre at South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust and King’s College London. The views expressed are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the NHS, the NIHR or the Department of Health. High performance computing facilities were funded with capital equipment grants from the GSTT Charity (TR130505) and Maudsley Charity (980). The research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health of the US National Institutes of Health under Award Number U01 MH109514. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health. CK currently receives salary support from National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) and has previously received salary support from the Novo Nordisk UK Research Foundation, NIHR Biomedical Research Centre for Mental Health at South London and from the Maudsley National Health Service (NHS) Foundation Trust in the past. CR is supported by a grant from Fondation Peters to TE and GB. JH is supported by the National Institutes of Health grant R01 MH113665. The iPSYCH team acknowledges funding from the Lundbeck Foundation (grant no R102-A9118 and R155-2014-1724), the Novo Nordisk Foundation for supporting the Danish National Biobank resource, and grants from Aarhus and Copenhagen Universities and University Hospitals, including support to the iSEQ Center, the GenomeDK HPC facility, and the CIRRAU Center. K.L.P acknowledges funding from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Medical Research Council UK.

Author information

Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Gerome Breen, Thalia C. Eley

Authors and Affiliations

  1. King’s College London; Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre; Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, London, UK

    Kirstin L. Purves, Jonathan R. I. Coleman, Christopher Rayner, Rosa Cheesman, Shing Wan Cho, Héléna A. Gaspar, Christopher Hübel, Gerome Breen & Thalia C. Eley

  2. NIHR Biomedical Research Centre, South London and Maudsley NHS Trust, London, UK

    Jonathan R. I. Coleman, Katrina A. S. Davis, Héléna A. Gaspar, Matthew Hotopf, Christopher Hübel, Gerome Breen & Thalia C. Eley

  3. Child and Adolescent Mental Health Centre–Mental Health Services Capital Region, Copenhagen Region, Denmark

    Sandra M. Meier

  4. Psychosis Research Unit, Aarhus University Hospital, Risskov, Denmark

    Sandra M. Meier & Ole Mors

  5. The Lundbeck Foundation Initiative for Integrative Psychiatric Research, iPSYCH, Denmark

    Sandra M. Meier, Marie Bækvad-Hansen, Anders D. Børglum, Jonas Bybjerg-Grauholm, David Hougaard, Ole Mors, Preben Bo Mortensen, Merete Nordentoft, Thomas Werge & Manuel Mattheisen

  6. King’s College London; Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, London, UK

    Katrina A. S. Davis & Matthew Hotopf

  7. Danish Centre for Neonatal Screening, Department for Congenital Disorders, Statens Serum Institut, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Marie Bækvad-Hansen, Jonas Bybjerg-Grauholm & David Hougaard

  8. Department of Biomedicine, Aarhus University, Aarhus C, Denmark

    Anders D. Børglum & Manuel Mattheisen

  9. Centre for integrative Sequencing (iSEQ), Aarhus University, Aarhus C, Denmark

    Anders D. Børglum & Preben Bo Mortensen

  10. Department of Psychiatry, Psychosomatics and Psychotherapy, Center of Mental Health, University Hospital Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany

    J. Jürgen Deckert & Manuel Mattheisen

  11. Department of Psychiatry, Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, USA

    John M. Hettema

  12. Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden

    Christopher Hübel

  13. King’s College London; Psychological Medicine; Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, London, UK

    Carol Kan

  14. Division of Psychiatry, Centre for Clinical Brain Sciences, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

    Andrew M. McIntosh

  15. MRC Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology, Edinburgh, UK

    Andrew M. McIntosh

  16. National Centre for Register-Based Research, Aarhus University, Aarhus C, Denmark

    Preben Bo Mortensen

  17. Mental Health Centre Copenhagen, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Merete Nordentoft

  18. Institute of Biological Psychiatry, Mental Health Centre Sct. Hans, Copenhagen University Hospital, Roskilde, Denmark

    Thomas Werge

  19. Department of Clinical Medicine, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Thomas Werge

  20. Centre for Genomic and Experimental Medicine, MRC Institute of Genetics & Molecular Medicine, The University of Edinburgh, Western General Hospital, Edinburgh, UK

    Kristin K. Nicodemus

  21. Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Centre for Psychiatric Research, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden

    Manuel Mattheisen

Authors
  1. Kirstin L. Purves
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Jonathan R. I. Coleman
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Sandra M. Meier
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Christopher Rayner
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Katrina A. S. Davis
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  6. Rosa Cheesman
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  7. Marie Bækvad-Hansen
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  8. Anders D. Børglum
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  9. Shing Wan Cho
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  10. J. Jürgen Deckert
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  11. Héléna A. Gaspar
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  12. Jonas Bybjerg-Grauholm
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  13. John M. Hettema
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  14. Matthew Hotopf
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  15. David Hougaard
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  16. Christopher Hübel
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  17. Carol Kan
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  18. Andrew M. McIntosh
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  19. Ole Mors
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  20. Preben Bo Mortensen
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  21. Merete Nordentoft
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  22. Thomas Werge
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  23. Kristin K. Nicodemus
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  24. Manuel Mattheisen
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  25. Gerome Breen
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  26. Thalia C. Eley
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Contributions

KP, TE, MH, KKN and GB conceived the study. KP, JC, SMM, CR, HG and SWC performed statistical analyses. CH, CK, HG, JC and KP performed phenotype and data QC for the UKBB samples. MM supervised the pre and post GWAS analysis pipeline for the iPSYCH sample. OM, MN, MBH, JBG, PBM, TW, DMH and ADB provided and processed samples for the iPSYCH sample. KP, JC, TE, GB wrote the paper. MH, KD, JH, JD, AM, MM gave advice and feedback at several stages of data generation and paper writing. All authors reviewed the paper.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Gerome Breen or Thalia C. Eley.

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Additional information

Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Supplementary information

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Purves, K.L., Coleman, J.R.I., Meier, S.M. et al. A major role for common genetic variation in anxiety disorders. Mol Psychiatry 25, 3292–3303 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-019-0559-1

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-019-0559-1

This article is cited by

Search

Advanced search

Quick links