The experience of maltreatment and neglect during childhood is among the strongest predictors for psychosis development later in life, but the underlying mechanisms remain subject of wide speculation. The overall goal of this project is to explore how parental genes that are not passed on to the child can help explain the association between adverse childhood experiences and psychosis through their contribution to the child’s environment.

A child’s exposure to a certain environment partially depends on the genes they inherit from their parents (for instance, genetic predisposition for risk-taking can affect the degree to which an individual seeks stressful life events). Importantly, we now know that genes of the parent that are not transmitted can nonetheless significantly shape the child through their impact on the parent’s behavior. This phenomenon, referred to as “genetic nurturing”, has typically been ignored in genetic studies, but may point to potential preventable exposures.

With increasingly powerful ‘genetic risk scores’ (i.e. the sum of risk genes that have shown to be associated with a disorder), we are now able to test the role of genetic nurturing in psychosis development.

Leveraging the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) study, we will be able to integrate genetic and developmental data on over 3,000 individuals that were followed up from birth up to age 24 - as well as their parents. This will give us the unique opportunity to examine the effect of genes that are not passed on to the child in the childhood adversity-psychosis relationship.