LONDON (Dispatches) -- New research has found that a high genetic risk for schizophrenia and other mental health conditions, including bipolar disorder, anorexia and autism, is associated with living in and moving to urban areas.
Lead author of the study at King’s College London said that their research indicated that at some level an individual’s genes select their environment and that the relationship between environmental and genetic influences on mental health is interrelated. This overlap needs to be considered when developing models to predict the risk of people developing mental health conditions in the future. He emphasized that the majority of those people in their analysis did not have a diagnosed mental health condition so they were showing that across the UK adult population this genetic risk for mental health conditions played a role in the environment that people lived.
Using the genetic data from 385,793 UK Biobank participants aged 37 to 73, the researchers calculated the polygenic risk score (PRS) for each individual for different mental health conditions. The PRS assesses the genetic liability across the entire genome of each individual rather than analysing liability at the level of individual genes.