12th Annual IGSS Conference • October 28-29, 2021

Integrating Genetics and the Social Sciences 2021

Direct and Indirect Polygenic Scores for Externalizing and Trajectories of Antisocial Behavior

Brooke Sasia, Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Antisocial behaviors (ASB) are characterized by aggressive (e.g., fighting, hitting) and non-aggressive (e.g., deceitfulness, theft) rule-breaking behaviors. Youth who engage in ASB are at a higher risk for drug and alcohol abuse, unemployment, and disproportionate use of public health services (e.g., criminal justice, health, and social welfare services) as adults (Bradshaw et al., 2010; Fairchild, 2018; Rivenbark et al., 2018). Despite being highly heritable (Burt, 2009), little is known about how genetic influences impact the development of ASB over time. For example, polygenic scores (PGS) for ASB, which characterize the aggregate effects of genetic risks underlying specific traits, are now powerful predictors of antisocial outcomes in various population studies (Linnér et al., in press), explaining as much as 10% of the phenotypic variance. However, it is still unclear how much of these genetic effects may be operating through the environment (i.e., genetic nurture; Kong et al., 2018). Thus, it is possible that PGS effects for heritable complex traits like ASB may be grossly overestimated, which would in turn have negative consequences for clinical prediction. Our study will employ a developmentally-sensitive approach to examine the influence of direct and indirect PGS for ASB (informed by Linnér et al., in press) using five waves of data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) spanning ages 13 to 43. Informed by prior work (Li, 2017; Moffitt, 1993; Morrison et al., 2019; Odgers et al., 2008) on longitudinal trajectories of ASB, we expect the emergence of a chronic trajectory of ASB for which a traditional PGS will be most robustly associated with. Then, we will estimate both the direct and indirect genetic effects in the PGS using data from the family level in UK Biobank using DONUTS (Wu et al., 2021). Using this method, we expect an attenuated a PGS signal for chronic ASB, such that association of the direct effect PGS should be stronger for chronic ASB trajectories, whereas indirect effect PGS should be more robust for developmentally-limited, less chronic trajectories of ASB. This study is poised to be the first to disentangle the environmental (i.e., indirect effect) component from a PGS in the prediction ASB outcomes within a developmental framework.

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