Mid Sweden University

Recent genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified several common variants associated with depression (Howard et al. 2019; Levey et al. 2021) and anxiety disorders (Levey et al. 2020; Meier et al. 2019; Purves et al. 2020), and these findings have been harnessed to develop polygenic scores (PGS) in order to provide an overall measure of individuals’ genetic liability to develop a disease (Torkamani et al. 2018). Research on the utility of PGSs as predictors of risk for disease is gaining traction, with studies on somatic illness showing that disease risk increases sharply in the right tail of the PGS distribution (Khera et al. 2018). Thus, PGS stratification could be of clinical relevance if it provides an opportunity to target those in need of preventive interventions with increased precision. The current potential of PGS stratification for depression and anxiety disorders remains an open question. In the current study, we applied 36 predefined PGSs from the polygenic index repository (Becker et al. 2021) on a target sample of 11,210 genotyped twins. Cases were defined as those with prescribed medication, where the prescription explicitly stated that a drug was ordinated for indication of depression or anxiety, respectively. Drugs included antidepressants (SSRI and SNRI), Benzodiazepines, Antihistamines, Buspirone, and Betablockers.