Abstract
Summary Prior evolutionary theory provided reason to suspect that measures of development and reproduction would be correlated with antisocial behaviours in human and non-human species. Behavioural genetics has revealed that most quantitative traits are heritable, suggesting that these phenotypic correlations may share genetic aetiologies. We use genome-wide association study data to estimate the genetic correlations between various measures of reproductive development (N = 52 776-318 863) and antisocial behaviour (N = 31 968). Our genetic correlation analyses demonstrate that alleles associated with higher reproductive output (number of children ever born, r g = 0.50, P = 0.0065) were positively correlated with alleles associated with antisocial behaviour, whereas alleles associated with more delayed reproductive onset (age at first birth, r g = -0.64, P = 0.0008) were negatively associated with alleles linked to antisocial behaviour. Ultimately, these findings coalesce with evolutionary theories suggesting that increased antisocial behaviours may partly represent a faster life history approach, which may be significantly calibrated by genes.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 467-470 |
| Number of pages | 4 |
| Journal | BJPsych Open |
| Volume | 4 |
| Issue number | 6 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Nov 1 2018 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2018 The Royal College of Psychiatrists.
Keywords
- Genome-wide association study
- antisocial behaviour
- linkage disequilibrium regression