Spouses tend to share psychiatric disorders, massive study finds

"The latest study, published in Nature Human Behaviour today, used data from more than 14.8 million people in Taiwan, Denmark and Sweden. It examined the proportion of people in those couples who had one of nine psychiatric disorders: schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), substance-use disorder and anorexia nervosa. Scientists lack a definitive understanding of what causes people to develop psychiatric disorders - but genetics and environmental factors are both thought to play a part."

"The team found that when one partner was diagnosed with one of the nine conditions, the other was significantly more likely to be diagnosed with the same or another psychiatric condition. Spouses were more likely to have the same conditions than to have different ones, says co-author Chun Chieh Fan, a population and genetics researcher at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research in Tulsa, Oklahoma."

Data from more than 14.8 million people in Taiwan, Denmark and Sweden were analyzed to examine psychiatric diagnoses within couples. Nine disorders were tracked: schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, ADHD, autism, OCD, substance-use disorder and anorexia nervosa. When one partner had one of these diagnoses, the other partner was significantly more likely to have the same or another psychiatric diagnosis. Spouses tended to share the same conditions more often than different ones. Only OCD, bipolar disorder and anorexia showed cross-country differences, and sharing of diagnoses increased slightly across later birth cohorts.

Read at Nature