GWAS on educational attainment in more than 1 million individuals

18. September 2018

A new genome-wide association study (GWAS) investigated the genetics of educational attainment in over 1 million individuals, including 2,000 from the Berlin Aging Study II (BASE-II) contributed by our group. The study represents one of the largest GWAS ever performed to date and identified nearly 1,300 independent lead SNPs to show genome-wide significant association with education. Many of the identified variants are located in genes involved in brain-development processes and neuron-to-neuron communication. Polygenic analyses suggest that up to 13% of the variance underlying inter-individual differences in educational attainment can now be explained by these data, more than explained by household income but less than by parental educational attainment. The study was published in the journal Nature Genetics.