ArticleBMC medicine2020
How important are parents in the development of child anxiety and depression? A genomic analysis of parent-offspring trios in the Norwegian Mother Father and Child Cohort Study (MoBa).
Article in BMC medicine, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 40 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
40 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 67 citations in OpenAlex.
- Genome-wide Association Meta-analysis of Childhood and Adolescent Internalizing Symptoms.Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry · 2022Pooled it
- Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of Genetically Informed Research: Associations Between Parent Anxiety and Offspring Internalizing Problems.Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry · 2021Pooled it
- Parental characteristics and offspring mental health and related outcomes: a systematic review of genetically informative literature.Translational psychiatry · 2021Pooled it
- Disentangling direct and indirect genetic pathways to neurodevelopmental risk: brain structure and behavior in a population-based parent-offspring trio study.Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines · 2026Article
- Estimating direct and indirect genetic effects on emerging variation in depressive symptoms in early adolescence: a trio polygenic score analysis in the MoBa cohort : Author list.European child & adolescent psychiatry · 2026Article
- The contribution of common and rare genetic variation to emotional and behavioural symptoms in childhood and adolescence.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Article
- Article
- Multivariate maternal effects across the internalizing-externalizing spectrum in childhood: results from the Norwegian mother, father, and child cohort study.Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines · 2026Article
- Direct and Indirect Genetic Effects on Child ADHD Traits in Early and Mid-Childhood: Trio Genome-Wide Complex Trait Analyses in a Large Norwegian Birth Registry Cohort.Behavior genetics · 2026Article
- [Association analysis between genetic nurturing effects ofBeijing da xue xue bao. Yi xue ban = Journal of Peking University. Health sciences · 2026Article
- Neurobehavioural genes exert indirect genetic effects on blood lipid profiles through behavioural traits.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Parental expectations and nocebo by proxy effects in adolescent orthodontic treatment outcomes.Scientific reports · 2026Observational
- The impact of critical periods of maternal generalized anxiety disorder on mental health problems in preschoolers: a Brazilian study of young mothers.European child & adolescent psychiatry · 2026Article
- Intra-familial dynamics of mental distress during the Covid-19 lockdown.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- Polygenic scores for psychiatric traits mediate the impact of multigenerational history for depression on offspring psychopathology.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Article
- Polygenic risk and trajectories of depressive symptoms in diverse adolescents: Gene-environment interplay with family conflict and parental acceptance.Development and psychopathology · 2025Article
- Diet as a source of the non-direct genetic effects in metabolic traits: evidence from a family-based GWAS study.Human genetics · 2025Article
- Genetic nurture effects in depressive and anxiety disorders and symptoms, and in related traits.Molecular psychiatry · 2025Article
- Educational attainment and mental health outcomes: A within-sibship Mendelian randomization study.Psychological medicine · 2025Article
- Using twin-pairs to assess potential bias in polygenic prediction of externalising behaviours across development.Molecular psychiatry · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
13 authors at 6 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundMany studies detect associations between parent behaviour and child symptoms of anxiety and depression. Despite knowledge that anxiety and depression are influenced by a complex interplay of genetic and environmental risk factors, most studies do not account for shared familial genetic risk. Quantitative genetic designs provide a means of controlling for shared genetics, but rely on observed putative exposure variables, and require data from highly specific family structures.
methodsThe intergenerational genomic method, Relatedness Disequilibrium Regression (RDR), indexes environmental effects of parents on child traits using measured genotypes. RDR estimates how much the parent genome influences the child indirectly via the environment, over and above effects of genetic factors acting directly in the child. This 'genetic nurture' effect is agnostic to parent phenotype and captures unmeasured heritable parent behaviours. We applied RDR in a sample of 11,598 parent-offspring trios from the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study (MoBa) to estimate parental genetic nurture separately from direct child genetic effects on anxiety and depression symptoms at age 8. We tested for mediation of genetic nurture via maternal anxiety and depression symptoms. Results were compared to a complementary non-genomic pedigree model.
resultsParental genetic nurture explained 14% of the variance in depression symptoms at age 8. Subsequent analyses suggested that maternal anxiety and depression partially mediated this effect. The genetic nurture effect was mirrored by the finding of family environmental influence in our pedigree model. In contrast, variance in anxiety symptoms was not significantly influenced by common genetic variation in children or parents, despite a moderate pedigree heritability.
conclusionsGenomic methods like RDR represent new opportunities for genetically sensitive family research on complex human traits, which until now has been largely confined to adoption, twin and other pedigree designs. Our results are relevant to debates about the role of parents in the development of anxiety and depression in children, and possibly where to intervene to reduce problems.
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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.