Abstract
UK Biobank participants do not have a high-quality measure of intelligence or polygenic scores (PGSs) of intelligence to simultaneously examine the genetic and neural underpinnings of intelligence. We created a standardized measure of general intelligence (g factor) relative to the UK population and estimated its quality. After running a GWAS of g on UK Biobank participants with a g factor of good quality and without neuroimaging data (N = 187,288), we derived a g PGS for UK Biobank participants with neuroimaging data. For individuals with at least one cognitive test, the g factor from eight cognitive tests (N = 501,650) explained 29% of the variance in cognitive test performance. The PGS for British individuals with neuroimaging data (N = 27,174) explained 7.6% of the variance in g. We provided high-quality g factor estimates for most UK Biobank participants and g factor PGSs for UK Biobank participants with neuroimaging data.
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Data availability
This research has been conducted using data from UK Biobank, a major biomedical database (http://www.ukbiobank.ac.uk/). Restrictions apply to the availability of these data, which were used under license for this study: application 46007. Supplements and code available on OSF: https://osf.io/49scv/?view_only=29e0ee6a1420461d81d234d94d549751.
Code availability
This research has been conducted using data from UK Biobank, a major biomedical database (http://www.ukbiobank.ac.uk/). Restrictions apply to the availability of these data, which were used under license for this study: application 46007. Supplements and code available on OSF: https://osf.io/49scv/?view_only=29e0ee6a1420461d81d234d94d549751.
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Funding
This work received support under the Program “Investissements d’Avenir” launched by the French Government and implemented by l’Agence Nationale de la recherche (ANR) with the Reference ANR-17-EURE-0017 and ANR-10-IDEX-0001-02 PSL. This research has been conducted using the UK Biobank Resource. Declarations of interest: none.
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Camille Michèle Williams, Ghislaine Labouret, Tobias Wolfram, Hugo Peyre and Franck Ramus states that there is no conflict of interest.
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The UK Biobank received ethical approval from the Research Ethics Committee (reference 11/NW/0382) and the present study was conducted based on application 46 007.
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Williams, C.M., Labouret, G., Wolfram, T. et al. A General Cognitive Ability Factor for the UK Biobank. Behav Genet 53, 85–100 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10519-022-10127-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10519-022-10127-6