Neuropsychiatric polygenic scores are weak predictors of professional categories

Access to full text: https://rdcu.be/d210J

Our team is excited to share our paper in Nature Human Behaviour. We investigated whether genetic predisposition (polygenic scores, or PGS) for 17 neuropsychiatric traits—ranging from mental health disorders like ADHD to personality traits such as agreeableness—might influence membership in 22 broad professional categories (e.g., “Computers & Math”).

Key questions: 1. Does higher genetic load for any of these traits increase the likelihood of entering certain professions? 2. Do these findings still hold when excluding individuals with any neuropsychiatric disorder diagnosis?

Main Findings 1. Weak but Significant Associations: Despite significance across multiple trait-profession pairs, each neuropsychiatric trait’s PGS explained less than 0.4% of variation in individual professional membership. 2. Stronger Influence from Age and Sex: Age accounted for around 21% of variance, and sex 7%, overshadowing the influence of genetic predisposition. 3. No “GATTACA” Scenario: Our data suggest that neuropsychiatric trait PGS currently can’t predict career outcomes—nor is it likely to become a robust predictor in the future displacing traditional assessments.

Motivations & Broader Context 1. Reducing Mental Health Stigma: Neuropsychiatric disorders are common and often highly heritable. Some risk variants could persist because they carry potential benefits under certain contexts. Our aim was to explore these potential “trade-offs” and contribute to a deeper understanding of how these common genetic factors shape our societies. For instance, our findings showed a positive association of ASD PGS with both “Computers & Math” and “Arts & design”. 2. Scientific Curiosity: We wanted to test whether neuropsychiatric PGS could serve as a strong predictor of professional membership. Our conclusion: not really—these scores cannot reliably forecast someone’s career path.

Further Insights 1. ADHD & Education: ADHD-related associations were largely mediated through educational attainment, which influenced career pathways. Notably, the gatekeeping “Education” profession itself had a negative association with ADHD PGS and a positive one with (contrasting) OCD PGS. Unfortunately, systemic modifiable biases in education may affect individuals with ADHD. 2. ASD & Management: “Management” showed a negative association with ASD PGS but a positive one with extraversion PGS—an intriguing contrast to “Computers & Math”—a finding that may resonate with frequent discussions about the social and organizational demands of tech management roles at HN.

Limitations of interest 1.We deliberately excluded intelligence, cognitive performance, and educational attainment PGS from our analyeses. 2. We chose more interpretable statistical approaches rather than complex machine-learning algorithms, as the goal was interpretability over prediction performance. 3. Future studies might use multivariate multiple regression approaches to uncover even more nuanced interactions.

Conclusion At the population level, there are small yet significant associations between neuropsychiatric trait PGS and professions. However, demographic factors—age, sex—and life circumstances dominate these outcomes. Genetic information alone won’t be a meaningful guide for career selection.

If you’d like to dive deeper please read the full article from the link shared at the top of the page.

Correspondence: georgios.voloudakis@mssm.edu (evoloution) panagiotis.roussos@mssm.edu

PS1: We hope this research helps reduce stigma around neurodivergence and mental health and spark further discussion on the complex interplay between genetics and life outcomes.

PS2: Figure 2 in our published paper has an error where the “Legal” data point was inadvertently removed (should overlap with horizontal dotted line just above “ga”); we plan to correct this soon.