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. 2023 Aug 15:335:233-238.
doi: 10.1016/j.jad.2023.05.019. Epub 2023 May 11.

Genetic predisposition to subjective well-being, depression, and suicide in relation to COVID-19 susceptibility and severity

Hongfei Song  1 , Na Lei  1 , Ling Zeng  1 , Xue Li  1 , Xiuyan Li  1 , Yuqiao Liu  1 , Jibin Liu  1 , Wenjun Wu  2 , Jie Mu  3 , Quansheng Feng  4
Affiliations

Genetic predisposition to subjective well-being, depression, and suicide in relation to COVID-19 susceptibility and severity

Hongfei Song et al. J Affect Disord. .

Abstract

Background: Epidemiological studies have reported associations between subjective well-being (SWB), depression, and suicide with COVID-19 illness, but the causality has not been established. We performed a two-sample Mendelian randomization (MR) analysis to investigate the causal link between SWB, depression, suicide and COVID-19 susceptibility and severity.

Methods: Summary statistics for SWB (298,420 cases), depression (113,769 cases) and suicide (52,208 cases) were obtained from three large-scale GWAS. Data on the associations between the Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) and COVID-19 (159,840 cases), hospitalized COVID-19 (44,986 cases), and severe COVID-19 (18,152 cases) were collected from the COVID-19 host genetics initiative. The causal estimate was calculated by the Inverse Variance Weighted, MR Egger and Weighted Median methods. Sensitivity tests were used to evaluate the validity of the causal relationship.

Results: Our results showed that genetically predicted SWB (OR = 0.98, 95 % CI: 0.86-1.10, P = 0.69), depression (OR = 0.76, 95 % CI: 0.54-1.06, P = 0.11), and suicide (OR = 0.99, 95 % CI: 0.96-1.02, P = 0.56) were not causally related to COVID-19 susceptibility. Similarly, we did not find a potential causal relationship between SWB, depression, suicide and COVID-19 severity.

Conclusions: This indicated that positive or negative emotions would not make COVID-19 better or worse, and strategies that attempted to use positive emotions to improve COVID-19 symptoms may be useless. Improving knowledge about the SARS-CoV-2 and timely medical intervention to reduce panic during a pandemic is one of the effective measures to deal with the current decrease in well-being and increase in depression and suicide rates.

Keywords: COVID-19; Depression; GWAS summary data; Mendelian randomization analyses; Subjective well-being; Suicide.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of competing interest The authors (Hongfei Song, Na Lei, Ling Zeng, Xue Li, Xiuyan Li, Yuqiao Liu, Jibin Liu, Wenjun Wu, Jie Mu, Quansheng Feng) have declared that they have no competing or potential conflicts of interest.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Summary of data sources and flowchart of study design.
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Forest plot of MR analysis between EOC and EC and female infertility.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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