A genome scan of neuroticism in nicotine dependent smokers

Neuroticism is a personality factor that has consistently been demonstrated to be associated with anxiety, depression, and other internalizing disorders. We analyzed a genome scan for neuroticism on a sample of 129 sib-pair families (113 with a single sibling pair, 18 with multiple sibling pairs) containing a total of 201 possible sibling pairs, ascertained for concordance on nicotine dependence. Using Merlin-Regress, we replicated peaks for neuroticism described by prior studies, on chromosomes 1 and 11 with LOD scores of 2.52 and 1.97 (P-value of 0.003 and 0.0108) respectively, and have some evidence for a novel finding on chromosome 12 with a LOD of 2.85 (P-value of 0.0014). (C) 2004 Wiley-Liss, Inc.