Modification of Heritability for Educational Attainment and Fluid Intelligence by Socioeconomic Deprivation in the UK Biobank

Abstract

Objective: Socioeconomic factors have been suggested to influence the effect of education- and intelligence-associated genetic variants. However, results from previous studies on the interaction between socioeconomic status and education or intelligence have been inconsistent. The authors sought to assess these interactions in the UK Biobank cohort of 500,000 participants.

Methods: The authors assessed the effect of socioeconomic deprivation on education- and intelligence-associated genetic variants by estimating the single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) heritability for fluid intelligence, educational attainment, and years of education in subsets of UK Biobank participants with different degrees of social deprivation, using linkage disequilibrium score regression. They also generated polygenic scores with LDpred and tested for interactions with social deprivation.

Results: SNP heritability increased with socioeconomic deprivation for fluid intelligence, educational attainment, and years of education. Polygenic scores were also found to interact with socioeconomic deprivation, where the effects of the scores increased with increasing deprivation for all traits.

Conclusions: These results indicate that genetics have a larger influence on educational and cognitive outcomes in more socioeconomically deprived U.K. citizens, which has serious implications for equality of opportunity.

Keywords: Education; Genetics/Genomics; Intelligence; Neuroscience; Socioeconomic Deprivation.