A sequence variant associating with educational attainment also affects childhood cognition

Abstract

Only a few common variants in the sequence of the genome have been shown to impact cognitive traits. Here we demonstrate that polygenic scores of educational attainment predict specific aspects of childhood cognition, as measured with IQ. Recently, three sequence variants were shown to associate with educational attainment, a confluence phenotype of genetic and environmental factors contributing to academic success. We show that one of these variants associating with educational attainment, rs4851266-T, also associates with Verbal IQ in dyslexic children (P = 4.3 × 10−4, β = 0.16 s.d.). The effect of 0.16 s.d. corresponds to 1.4 IQ points for heterozygotes and 2.8 IQ points for homozygotes. We verified this association in independent samples consisting of adults (P = 8.3 × 10−5, β = 0.12 s.d., combined P = 2.2 x 10−7, β = 0.14 s.d.). Childhood cognition is unlikely to be affected by education attained later in life, and the variant explains a greater fraction of the variance in verbal IQ than in educational attainment (0.7% vs 0.12%,. P = 1.0 × 10−5).

Genome-wide analyses identify 21 infertility loci and over 400 reproductive hormone loci across the allele frequency spectrum

“…Previous efforts to catalogue the genome-wide architecture of infertility have relied on proxy measures such as childlessness and number of children ever born 24,25 , which may be confounded by behavioural, socio-economic, and lifestyle factors. While we did find modest genetic correlation between female infertility and age at first sexual intercourse (-18.8%), indicating that the latter captures some shared biology with fertility, our meta-analyses did not replicate the associations of infertility proxy variables with putative behavioural loci for risk-taking 85,86 or educational attainment 85,[87][88][89] . Instead, we nominate genes with putative roles in both male and female gonads, such as TRHR for ovarian insufficiency 39,40 and ENO4 for sperm motility 44 .…”