2025-08-28 12:00:00 -0400 EDT
New work led by Chun Chieh Fan examining spousal similarity in psychiatric disorders across cultures and generations.
Spousal correlations for nine psychiatric disorders are consistent across cultures and persistent over generations
Trait similarities between spouses are a key factor that shapes the landscape of complex human traits. The driving force behind spousal correlations can increase the overall prevalence of disorders, influence comorbidities, and bias estimations of genetic architectures. We performed a large-scale analysis on spousal correlations across nine psychiatric disorders, using data from approximately five million spousal pairs in Taiwan, 571,534 pairs from the Danish national registry, and 707,263 pairs from the Swedish national registry. We found that a majority of psychiatric disorders have consistent spousal correlations across nations and persist over generations, with implications for understanding the genetic architecture of psychiatric conditions.