Trial reportPloS one2015
Human fertility, molecular genetics, and natural selection in modern societies.
Trial report in PloS one, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 44 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
44 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 98 citations in OpenAlex.
- Genome-wide analyses identify 25 infertility loci and relationships with reproductive traits across the allele frequency spectrum.Nature genetics · 2025Pooled it
- No genome-wide correlations and little shared genetic architecture between reproductive life-history traits and estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer risk.Molecular biology and evolution · 2026Article
- Genetic trade-offs in fertility and longevity explain the maintenance of disease-associated alleles in humans.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
- Association of GPR30 Genetic Variants with Recurrent Implantation Failure: A Case-Control Study Comparing Fertile Women, ART Success and RIF Patients.Reproductive sciences (Thousand Oaks, Calif.) · 2026Article
- Natural selection on reproductive timing varies by education in twentieth-century Estonia.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- Genetics of female and male reproductive traits and their relationship with health, longevity and consequences for offspring.Nature aging · 2024Review
- Unveiling recent and ongoing adaptive selection in human populations.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- The causal effect of educational attainment on stress urinary incontinence: a two-sample mendelian randomization study.BMC women's health · 2023Article
- Genome-wide analysis identifies genetic effects on reproductive success and ongoing natural selection at the FADS locus.Nature human behaviour · 2023Article
- Late age at first birth is a protective factor for oesophageal cancer and gastro-oesophageal reflux: the evidence from the genetic study.Frontiers in endocrinology · 2023Article
- Association of age at first sexual intercourse and lifetime number of sexual partners with cardiovascular diseases: a bi-directional Mendelian randomization study.Frontiers in cardiovascular medicine · 2023Article
- The influence of genetic architecture on responses to selection under drought in rice.Evolutionary applications · 2022Article
- Identification of 371 genetic variants for age at first sex and birth linked to externalising behaviour.Nature human behaviour · 2021Article
- Phenotypic Signals of Sexual Selection and Fast Life History Dynamics for the Long-Term but Not Short-Term Mating.Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behavior · 2021Article
- Estimating direct and indirect genetic effects on offspring phenotypes using genome-wide summary results data.Nature communications · 2021Article
- Review
- Age at first birth and lung cancer: a two-sample Mendelian randomization study.Translational lung cancer research · 2021Article
- Genetic Regulation of Physiological Reproductive Lifespan and Female Fertility.International journal of molecular sciences · 2021Review
- Article
- The genetic relationship between female reproductive traits and six psychiatric disorders.Scientific reports · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors at 4 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Research on genetic influences on human fertility outcomes such as number of children ever born (NEB) or the age at first childbirth (AFB) has been solely based on twin and family-designs that suffer from problematic assumptions and practical limitations. The current study exploits recent advances in the field of molecular genetics by applying the genomic-relationship-matrix based restricted maximum likelihood (GREML) methods to quantify for the first time the extent to which common genetic variants influence the NEB and the AFB of women. Using data from the UK and the Netherlands (N = 6,758), results show significant additive genetic effects on both traits explaining 10% (SE = 5) of the variance in the NEB and 15% (SE = 4) in the AFB. We further find a significant negative genetic correlation between AFB and NEB in the pooled sample of -0.62 (SE = 0.27, p-value = 0.02). This finding implies that individuals with genetic predispositions for an earlier AFB had a reproductive advantage and that natural selection operated not only in historical, but also in contemporary populations. The observed postponement in the AFB across the past century in Europe contrasts with these findings, suggesting an evolutionary override by environmental effects and underscoring that evolutionary predictions in modern human societies are not straight forward. It emphasizes the necessity for an integrative research design from the fields of genetics and social sciences in order to understand and predict fertility outcomes. Finally, our results suggest that we may be able to find genetic variants associated with human fertility when conducting GWAS-meta analyses with sufficient sample size.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.