A genome-wide association study meta-analysis of ADHD was presented as part of a study in Nature Genetics. The research identified 27 genetic risk variants linked to ADHD.
In the research, more than 38,000 people with a history of ADHD, in addition to 186,843 controls, were included.
According to the study: ” Overall, ADHD genetic risk was associated with several brain-specific neuronal subtypes and midbrain dopaminergic neurons.”
“In exome-sequencing data from 17,896 individuals, we identified an increased load of rare protein-truncating variants in ADHD for a set of risk genes enriched with probable causal common variants, potentially implicating SORCS3 in ADHD by both common and rare variants. Bivariate Gaussian mixture modeling estimated that 84–98% of ADHD-influencing variants are shared with other psychiatric disorders.”
“In addition, common-variant ADHD risk was associated with impaired complex cognition such as verbal reasoning and a range of executive functions, including attention.”