Genetic Risk and Sexual Trauma May Predict Mental Illness
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Genetic Risk and Sexual Trauma May Predict Mental Illness
Jim Windell
Our genes are made of DNA and that determines what you like, how you look, how you behave and other factors. For instance, our genes affect our health throughout life.
The minor differences in our genes may be related to what we inherited, or they can be the result of the interaction between our genes and the environment. That can help explain why some of us develop certain diseases and others do not.
A research team led by Allison Lake, an M.D. and Ph.D. student at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, conducted a study exploring how genes and environmental factors interact in psychiatry. She discovered that a history of sexual trauma and a genetic tendency to develop mental illness are associated with increased risk for schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depression.
The study, published recently in JAMA Psychiatry, evaluated electronic health records (EHR) linked to genomic data from two large hospital systems that are part of PsycheMERGE, a collaborative network of EHR-linked biobanks with a focus on advancing precision psychiatry in diverse populations. The clinical and genetic data from more than 96,000 participants in EHR-linked biobanks at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (BioVU) and Mass General Brigham in Boston were included in the research.
The study population included individuals of European (88.5%) and African (11.5%) ancestries. The team used a natural language processing approach to detect sexual trauma disclosures, which includes sexual abuse, assault and rape, from clinical notes.
“Evaluating how genetic risk interacts with environmental risk factors such as sexual trauma is important for understanding how mental illness develops and identifying high-risk groups for early intervention,” said Lake, co-corresponding and first author of the study.
Lake and her team found that polygenic scores — estimates of a person’s genetic predisposition for a specific disease — for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder had weaker associations with mental health outcomes in individuals who reported sexual trauma.
“Our study suggests that schizophrenia and bipolar disorder polygenic scores generated using existing methods may be less predictive in the context of sexual trauma,” Lake says. “As polygenic scores are being considered for use in clinical settings, our findings demonstrate the importance of expanding clinical screening efforts for trauma and other environmental risk factors that may impact the clinical interpretation of polygenic scores.”
In the future, Lake aims to build on the research by investigating how natural language processing and artificial intelligence can be used to accurately characterize social determinants of health from the EHR for incorporation into genomic studies.
“All natural language processing algorithms are limited by what data are available in the medical record, which is a consequence of what physicians screen for and document,” Lake says. “As a future psychiatrist, I hope to advocate for routine screening and documentation of social determinants of health in the medical record to both enhance clinical care and improve the quality of clinical data that can be extracted from the EHR for research use.”
To read the complete article, find it with this reference:
Lake, A.M., Zhou, Y., Wang, B. et al. (2024). Sexual Trauma, Polygenic Scores, and Mental Health Diagnoses and Outcomes. JAMA Psychiatry. Published online October 30, 2024. doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2024.3426