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| Type | Journal Article |
| Scope | Discipline-based scholarship |
| Title | Genetic underpinnings of risky behaviour relate to altered neuroanatomy |
| Organization Unit | |
| Authors |
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| Item Subtype | Original Work |
| Refereed | Yes |
| Status | Published in final form |
| Language |
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| Journal Title | Nature Human Behaviour |
| Publisher | Nature Publishing Group |
| Geographical Reach | international |
| ISSN | 2397-3374 |
| Volume | 5 |
| Number | 6 |
| Page Range | 787 - 794 |
| Date | 2021 |
| Abstract Text | Previous research points to the heritability of risk-taking behaviour. However, evidence on how genetic dispositions are translated into risky behaviour is scarce. Here, we report a genetically informed neuroimaging study of real-world risky behaviour across the domains of drinking, smoking, driving and sexual behaviour in a European sample from the UK Biobank (N = 12,675). We find negative associations between risky behaviour and grey-matter volume in distinct brain regions, including amygdala, ventral striatum, hypothalamus and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC). These effects are replicated in an independent sample recruited from the same population (N = 13,004). Polygenic risk scores for risky behaviour, derived from a genome-wide association study in an independent sample (N = 297,025), are inversely associated with grey-matter volume in dlPFC, putamen and hypothalamus. This relation mediates roughly 2.2% of the association between genes and behaviour. Our results highlight distinct heritable neuroanatomical features as manifestations of the genetic propensity for risk taking. |
| Digital Object Identifier | 10.1038/s41562-020-01027-y |
| Other Identification Number | merlin-id:20939 |
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| Keywords | Behavioural genetics, decision ,economics, human behaviour, reward |