ArticleGenes, brain, and behavior2018
Predicting loneliness with polygenic scores of social, psychological and psychiatric traits.
Article in Genes, brain, and behavior, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
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Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed, 53 citations in OpenAlex.
- Investigating the associations between neurodevelopmental and psychiatric genetic liability and adverse social and functional outcomes across childhood, adolescence and young-adulthood.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Article
- Loneliness as a Pathway Linking Hearing Decline to Cognitive Aging: Longitudinal and Genetic Evidence.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
- Sociability is a Multidimensional Trait in Drosophila melanogaster.Behavior genetics · 2026Article
- Social well-being moderates behavioral therapy response for generalized anxiety disorder.Journal of mood and anxiety disorders · 2025Article
- Nationwide longitudinal study reveals impact of both national restriction levels and genetic risk factors on loneliness during the COVID-19 pandemic.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Factors associated with loneliness in Latin-American family care partners during the COVID-19 pandemic.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2024Article
- Would the Real Loneliness Please Stand Up? The Validity of Loneliness Scores and the Reliability of Single-Item Scores.Assessment · 2023Article
- Loneliness, Depression, and Genetics in the Elderly: Prognostic Factors of a Worse Health Condition?International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
- Polygenic risk for mental disorder reveals distinct association profiles across social behaviour in the general population.Molecular psychiatry · 2022Article
- Polygenic contribution to the relationship of loneliness and social isolation with schizophrenia.Nature communications · 2022Article
- The predictive capacity of psychiatric and psychological polygenic risk scores for distinguishing cases in a child and adolescent psychiatric sample from controls.Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines · 2021Article
- Article
- Moving from Humanities to Sciences: A New Model of Wisdom Fortified by Sciences of Neurobiology, Medicine, and Evolution.Psychological inquiry · 2020Article
- Effects of the Openness to Experience Polygenic Score on Cortical Thickness and Functional Connectivity.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2020Article
- Evidence for a sex-specific contribution of polygenic load for anorexia nervosa to body weight and prefrontal brain structure in nonclinical individuals.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2019Article
- Phenome-wide investigation of health outcomes associated with genetic predisposition to loneliness.Human molecular genetics · 2019Article
- Multi-Polygenic Score Approach to Identifying Individual Vulnerabilities Associated With the Risk of Exposure to Bullying.JAMA psychiatry · 2019Article
- Connectome-based individualized prediction of loneliness.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2019Article
- A Genetic Investigation of the Well-Being Spectrum.Behavior genetics · 2019Article
- How does loneliness "get under the skin" to become biologically embedded?Biodemography and social biologyReview
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Authors and funding
11 authors at 5 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Loneliness is a heritable trait that accompanies multiple disorders. The association between loneliness and mental health indices may partly be due to inherited biological factors. We constructed polygenic scores for 27 traits related to behavior, cognition and mental health and tested their prediction for self-reported loneliness in a population-based sample of 8798 Dutch individuals. Polygenic scores for major depressive disorder (MDD), schizophrenia and bipolar disorder were significantly associated with loneliness. Of the Big Five personality dimensions, polygenic scores for neuroticism and conscientiousness also significantly predicted loneliness, as did the polygenic scores for subjective well-being, tiredness and self-rated health. When including all polygenic scores simultaneously into one model, only 2 major depression polygenic scores remained as significant predictors of loneliness. When controlling only for these 2 MDD polygenic scores, only neuroticism and schizophrenia remain significant. The total variation explained by all polygenic scores collectively was 1.7%. The association between the propensity to feel lonely and the susceptibility to psychiatric disorders thus pointed to a shared genetic etiology. The predictive power of polygenic scores will increase as the power of the genome-wide association studies on which they are based increases and may lead to clinically useful polygenic scores that can inform on the genetic predisposition to loneliness and mental health.
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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.