Assortative mating across nine psychiatric disorders is consistent and persistent over cultures and generations

Abstract

Emerging evidence has shown that assortative mating (AM) is a key factor that shapes the landscape of complex human traits. It can increase the overall prevalence of disorders, influence occurrences of comorbidities, and bias estimation of genetic architectures. However, there is lack of large-scale studies to examine the cultural differences and the generational trends of AM for psychiatric disorders. Here, using national registry datasets, we conduct the largest scale of AM analyses on nine psychiatric disorders, with up to 1.4 million mated cases and 6 million matched controls. We performed meta-analyses on AM estimates from Taiwan, Denmark, and Sweden, to examine the potential impact of cultural differences. Generational changes for people born after 1930s were investigated as well. We found that AM of psychiatric disorders are consistent across nations and persistent over generations, with a small proportion of disorders showing generational changes of AM. Our results provide additional insight into the mechanisms of AM across psychiatric disorders and have evident implications on the estimation of the genetic architectures of psychiatric disorders.