@fstreit
psychologist|@zi_mannheim|psychiatric genetics|stress depression pgc.unc.edu/for-researchers/working-groups/mdd personality disorders https://zi-mannheim.de/pdgg german national cohort nako.de/en/research/expert-groups/neurological-and-psychiatric-diseases
There is high symptom and genetic overlap across psychiatric conditions. @andrewgrotzinger.bsky.social et al. (2025) explored this using our #GWAS data of over 1 mil cases across 14 conditions. They assessed the genetic architecture and the functional roles of genes across these conditions.
🧵 New publication from the PGC Anxiety Working Group. Our GWAS meta-analysis of anxiety disorders is now published in @natgenet.nature.com! 🔗: doi.org/10.1038/s415...
New report by the PGC outreach committee:
From Genomes to Conversations: Outreach and Engagement in Psychiatric Genetics (2026)
An important contribution on why dialogue, and responsible communication must be integral to psychiatric genetics.
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
My department @bsse.ethz.ch is inviting applications for a new assistant professor (tenure-track) in computational immunology, interested candidates please see advert and apply! Deadline 15 April 2026 ethz.ch/en/the-eth-z...
Examining the Contribution of Childhood Maltreatment to the Gender Gap in Depression: Insights from the German National Cohort (NAKO) https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.02.26345366v1
We thank all participants of the @nako.de and the many researchers and staff involved.
Special thanks to Aina Kresken and Maja Völker, who led the analyses as part of their Master’s and PhD work 👏
These findings are based on cross-sectional data, and childhood maltreatment was reported retrospectively, which may introduce recall or reporting bias.
Causal interpretations should therefore be made with caution.
Mediation analyses including all five childhood maltreatment subtypes jointly, showed that childhood maltreatment mediated ~19% of the sex difference in lifetime depression and ~30% of the sex difference in current depression, mainly due to sex differences in exposure.
We estimated population attributable fractions (PAFs) to quantify the contribution.
Overall, maltreatment accounted for 26% of lifetime depression and 33% of current depression, with consistently higher contributions in females.
Emotional abuse and emotional neglect showed the largest contributions.
For lifetime depression (physician’s diagnosis), physical abuse and physical neglect showed stronger associations in females, whereas sexual abuse showed a stronger association in males. All maltreatment subtypes were associated with substantially increased odds of depression in both sexes.
We examined five types of childhood maltreatment.
Females reported higher prevalence of sexual abuse, emotional abuse, and emotional neglect, with the strongest sex difference for sexual abuse (~9.5% vs 2.5%). Physical abuse was slightly more common in males (~8.3% vs 7.7%).
We analyzed data from 159,045 participants aged 19–72 years from the German National Cohort.
Both lifetime depression (physician’s diagnosis) and current depression (PHQ-9 ≥ 10) were more common in females than in males
(17.7% vs 10.1% and 9.0% vs 5.9%, respectively).
Happy to share our newest preprint!
Depression is more common in females than in males, but it remains insufficiently understood why.
Using data from the German National Cohort (NAKO) @nako.de, we investigated whether childhood maltreatment may contribute to this gender gap.
doi.org/10.64898/202...
Looking forward to it!
New paper out:
Some people are systematically better at judging others’ intelligence.
Who are the best judges? People WHO are intelligent themselves, have good emotion-perception ability, and who are high in well-being.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
I want to thank all researchers involved, including Maja Völker, Carolin Callies, and Stephanie Witt, and all the staff and participants of @nako.de. Looking forward to extend this investigation to the longditudinal data available now, and to other data domains including MRI and genetics!
We observed a clear dose-response relationship: higher daily cigarette consumption correlates with more severe depressive symptoms, while the risk decreases the longer an individual has remained abstinent.
Our analysis reveals that both lifetime and current depression are lowest in never-smokers, highest in current smokers, and intermediate in former smokers.
Happy to share this: we confirmed a significant link between smoking and depression using data from the @nako.de. Our analysis of over 170,000 participants shows that both current and former smokers face a higher lifetime risk of depression. #MentalHealth #ResearchNews #PublicHealth
Analysis of over 170,000 adults indicates that current and former smokers experience depression more frequently than never-smokers, with risk decreasing the longer a person has quit smoking. doi.org/hbk2gw
A very comprehensive review of the genetics of personlity led by @tedmond.bsky.social This is a great onramp for those who haven't checked into psychiatric genetics or bahviour genetics in a while. www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...
This is an interesting challenge, Its A LOT of data for psychology, but not for ML perse. I wonder whether there is juice to be squeezed out of other EMA data, which would only have partial feature overlap, loads of other EMA data lives here: openesmdata.org.
‘A fragmented field: Construct and measure proliferation in psychology.’ (2025)
From ‘Language models accurately infer correlations between psychological items and scales from text alone.’ (2025)
From ‘Not within spitting distance: salivary immunoassays of estradiol have subpar validity for predicting cycle phase.’ (2023)
Work in progress with cycle tracking data from the app Clue
Want to make nice graphs with me, starting next year? I'm hiring for a position at the University of Witten/Herdecke.
uni-wh.softgarden.io/job/61280592...
🚨New preprint from PGC SUI!! @pgcgenetics.bsky.social
GWAS meta-analyses of suicidal ideation, attempt, death, and behavior across >50 cohorts identify 77 loci (59 novel), implicate subcortical brain regions, and show suicidality phenotypes are genetically distinct.
www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...
🧠 Why do some brains age faster than others?
🧬 Our new Nature Aging study of over 56,000 participants explores the genetics of the “brain age gap” — the difference between your brain’s biological and chronological age.
nature.com/articles/s43587-025-00962-7
Thread below 👇
Breaking the Norm: Population-Scale Normative Modeling of Brain Structure in Depression and Anxiety https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.26.25336528v1
Breaking the Norm: Population-Scale Normative Modeling of Brain Structure in Depression and Anxiety | medRxiv www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...
An updated preprint of our Borderline Personality Disorder GWAS is now online:
www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...
The field of neuroscience views the goal of human genetics as "finding genes". This is an outdated view. In whole genome studies of rare variants, finding genes is the easy part. The more interesting and important goal is to map out the causal pathway from genes to brain function to cognitive traits
Got prov. approval for 2 major grants in Neuro-AI & Dynamical Systems Reconstruction, on learning & inference in non-stationary environments, out-of-domain generalization, and DS foundation models. To all AI/math/DS enthusiasts: Expect job announcements (PhD/PostDoc) soon! Feel free to get in touch.