A Polygenic Risk Score Associated with Measures of Depressive Symptoms Among Older Adults

It has been suggested that depression is a polygenic trait, arising from the influences of multiple loci with small individual effects. The aim of this study is to generate a polygenic risk score (PRS) to examine the association between genetic variation and depressive symptoms. Our analytic sample included N = 10,091 participants aged 50 and older from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). Depressive symptoms were measured by Center for Epidemiological Studies-Depression scale (CESD) scores assessed on up to nine occasions across 18 years. We conducted a genome-wide association analysis for a discovery set (n = 7,000) and used the top 11 single-nucleotide polymorphisms, all with p < 10(-5) to generate a weighted PRS for our replication sample (n = 3,091). Results showed that the PRS was significantly associated with mean CESD score in the replication sample (beta = .08, p = .002). The R-2 change for the inclusion of the PRS was .003. Using a multinomial logistic regression model, we also examined the association between genetic risk and chronicity of high (4+) CESD scores. We found that a one-standard-deviation increase in PRS was associated with a 36 percent increase in the odds of having chronically high CESD scores relative to never having had high CESD scores. Our findings are consistent with depression being a polygenic trait and suggest that the cumulative influence of multiple variants increases an individual's susceptibility for chronically experiencing high levels of depressive symptoms.