Discovery of the first genome-wide significant risk loci for ADHD
Abstract
Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a highly heritable childhood behavioral disorder affecting 5% of school-age children and 2.5% of adults. Common genetic variants contribute substantially to ADHD susceptibility, but no individual variants have been robustly associated with ADHD. We report a genome-wide association meta-analysis of 20,183 ADHD cases and 35,191 controls that identifies variants surpassing genome-wide significance in 12 independent loci, revealing new and important information on the underlying biology of ADHD. Associations are enriched in evolutionarily constrained genomic regions and loss-of-function intolerant genes, as well as around brain-expressed regulatory marks. These findings, based on clinical interviews and/or medical records are supported by additional analyses of a self-reported ADHD sample and a study of quantitative measures of ADHD symptoms in the population. Meta-analyzing these data with our primary scan yielded a total of 16 genome-wide significant loci. The results support the hypothesis that clinical diagnosis of ADHD is an extreme expression of one or more continuous heritable traits.
Subject Area
- Biochemistry (11562)
- Bioengineering (8622)
- Bioinformatics (28865)
- Biophysics (14793)
- Cancer Biology (11921)
- Cell Biology (17165)
- Clinical Trials (138)
- Developmental Biology (9302)
- Ecology (14019)
- Epidemiology (2067)
- Evolutionary Biology (18128)
- Genetics (12145)
- Genomics (16615)
- Immunology (11706)
- Microbiology (27690)
- Molecular Biology (11386)
- Neuroscience (60092)
- Paleontology (447)
- Pathology (1847)
- Pharmacology and Toxicology (3183)
- Physiology (4878)
- Plant Biology (10276)
- Synthetic Biology (2849)
- Systems Biology (7289)
- Zoology (1618)