Understanding Society omics data is used by researchers to explore a wide range of questions.
Until 2019, Understanding Society omics projects were approved by METADAC. You can find details of approved METADAC projects on their website.
Principal applicant: Professor Chris Dawson
There exists a burgeoning literature on the relationship between cognitive ability, judgemental biases and political decisions. For instance, using Understanding Society, Dawson (2023) illustrates that judgemental biases in decision making, specifically optimism bias, are partly a consequence of low cognitive ability, whilst Dawson and Baker (2023) illustrate the relationship between cognitive ability and voting for Brexit in the 2016 UK referendum on European Union membership. These findings may suggest intelligence directly alters our political views and susceptibility to errors in judgements. Alternatively, the association may be confounded or mediated by socioeconomic and environmental factors. From the Understanding Society Genotype, Epigenetic and Phenotype Data we intend to create polygenic risk scores associated with intelligence/cognitive ability, which will be used to conduct a Mendelian randomisation study. Specifically, our Mendelian randomisation method will use these genetic variants (polygenic risk scores for intelligence) as instrumental variables for observable cognitive ability, when predicting economic and political decisions. This method, under certain assumptions, will enable us to identify causal relationships between intelligence and economic and political decisions.
Principal applicant: Professor Conchita D’Ambrosio
One of the most recent trends across democratic countries is the consistent decrease in voter turnout. Lack of political participation seems particularly widespread among low-income people. In this project, we aim to explain this downward trend by means of the Inequality of Opportunity (IOp) framework. By using different political participation outcomes, we aim to estimate how much of this phenomenon can be attributed to circumstances beyond individual controls, such as gender, ethnic group, parental background, and genetic endowment and how much is due to individual effort/choice. By exploiting the panel dimension of Understanding Society, we plan to compare the strength of this effect across generations. We will use a data-driven approach to estimate IOp, as the latest trend in the literature recommends. By including the ‘polygenic indices’ for educational attainment and cognitive performance as an additional set of circumstances, we will be able to estimate IOp more precisely and be one of the first contributions to do so.
Principal applicant: Dr Eilis Hannon
Understanding the relationship between genetic and epigenetic variation can shed light on mechanisms behind health and disease. Previously, using data from 1,111 individuals in the Understanding Society study, we analysed the impact of common genetic variation on DNA methylation and demonstrated its utility in interpreting the functional consequences of genetic associations with complex traits. Now, we want to expand these analyses with the latest set of epigenetic data from over 2,500 individuals. Specifically, we plan to estimate the heritability of DNA methylation at individual sites in the genome and build the most comprehensive database of methylation quantitative trait loci (mQTL). These findings will be compared with existing brain data generated by the applicant team to assess tissue specificity and provide a valuable resource for the research community to fine-map genome-wide association study results.
Principal applicant: Professor Adelina Gschwandtner
This project attempts to examine the relationship between personality and lifestyle in the UK using genetic information as indicators for personality. It attempts to determine if personality leads to a specific lifestyle decision such as exercising or whether exercising for example helps shaping personality. The project also aims to determine if there are significant differences between men and women. Personality can be measured by the big 5 personality traits (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeability and Neuroticism) and lifestyle by exercise and nutrition. These two lifestyle choices have been shown to lead to better health outcomes. We are focusing specifically on the relationship between exercise and the personality trait Neuroticism. If genetic markers help us to find a causal link between Neuroticism and health exercise, personalised and better tailored health promotion and recommendations would be possible. These personalized promotions/recommendations could be more efficient and lead to better results. These issues are especially relevant in the present context of surging healthcare costs related to lifestyle diseases.
Principal applicant: Professor Weilong Zhang
We aim to use genetics data linked with social and economic data to help inform the interaction between wellbeing, fertility and economic outcomes. Firstly, we will aim to exploit the random variation in genes at birth to ascertain the causal effect of wellbeing on social and economic outcomes. We will then conduct an event study to determine the effect of childbirth on mental health, and whether a genetic predisposition towards mental health plays a role here. Finally, we will estimate an economic model incorporating genetics, fertility, mental health, and economic outcomes to simulate how policies can be designed to achieve joint outcomes of high rates of fertility, positive economic outcomes, mental health and overall welfare.
Principal applicant: Dr Nicolau Martin-Bassols
Health inequality begins at conception and amplifies throughout the life cycle. Disparities in mental and physical health stem from a blend of genetic predispositions and environmental influences. Genetics may either mitigate or exacerbate the effects of the environment. This project integrates methodologies from genetics and economics to examine how gene-environment interactions (GxE) shape health outcomes across individuals’ lifespans. Our focus will be on analyzing the impact of the implementation of the universal National Health Service in the United Kingdom. Additionally, we will investigate the ramifications of exposure to challenging labour market conditions, which will be measured by automation, the process in which industrial robots replace human tasks in production. By studying exposure to these environments at various life stages, we aim to capture critical periods that influence health outcomes and determine whether the GxE effect persists over the short or long term.
Principal applicant: Dr Ricky Kanabar
In this study, we seek to understand how testosterone affects earnings. Existing studies show economic and sociodemographic factors affect individual’s earnings however biological factors have received far less attention. However, previous research shows that testosterone can affect individual behaviour in many ways. For example, men with high testosterone levels tend to have higher cognitive ability, take more risks and enjoy competing with others—but they can also act more social. This might also be true for women, although we know less about how testosterone affects women’s behaviour. Considering this, we intend to study the effects of testosterone levels on earnings and earnings persistence over time. In particular, we plan to analyse the role of occupation and individual behaviour as factors that might partly explain the relationship between testosterone and earnings.
Many factors influence testosterone levels and earnings simultaneously (e.g., health). The interpretation of the research findings might be invalid if we fail to account for these factors. The primary challenge is that not all of them are observable. To address this problem, we intend to use variations in genes that are fixed at birth and should therefore be unrelated to other factors that influence earnings and testosterone levels. In addition, research shows testosterone levels vary throughout the day and as individuals age (particularly among men). Using genetic markers provides us with a measure free of such fluctuations. This study seeks to improve understanding of the link between biological markers, occupation and earnings performance. Such evidence is helpful, for example, in profiling candidates for active labour market policies, designing in-work training programmes and understanding how ongoing major structural changes in the labour market are more generally related to labour market earnings and wage polarisation.
Published outputs:
In the media: The Economist, More testosterone means higher pay – for some men.
Principal applicant: Dr Hilary Martin
About 1% of babies are born with a developmental disorder which affects mental or physical development, such as intellectual disability or congenital heart defects. Many of these disorders are at least partly genetic, often due to a rare change in a single gene. We showed previously that common genetic variants that influence cognitive ability, educational attainment and mental health traits in the general population affect risk of rare neurodevelopmental disorders too. We are exploring the genetic basis of rare neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs) in two large cohorts of patients, Deciphering Developmental Disorders (DDD) and the Genomics England 100k Genomes project (GEL). We wish to use individuals UKHLS as population-based controls in these analyses, since most of them do not have NDDs. We will calculate genetic risk scores for different traits (e.g. educational attainment, schizophrenia) and compare these between NDD cases and UKHLS participants. Finally, we will explore how our results are affected by potential ascertainment biases in UKHLS (e.g. more educated people potentially being more likely to donate DNA). Our eventual goal is to improve our understanding of the biology underlying severe intellectual disability, and to improve our ability to predict the chance that parents with one affected child might have another.
Published outputs:
Huang, Q.Q., Wigdor, E.M., Malawsky, D.S. et al. Examining the role of common variants in rare neurodevelopmental conditions. Nature 636, 404–411 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08217-y
Understanding Society blog: Common DNA differences and rare brain conditions
Principal applicant: Dr Liam Wright
This project will use genetic data from the UKHLS to provide insights into two important policy areas: regional inequalities and the obesity epidemic. The project will comprise two studies. Study 1 will use genetic data to reassess geographical disparities in skills; firstly, by examining how PGS for cognitive ability and educational attainment – traits that are strong predictors of productivity – are distributed across the UK, and secondly by assessing whether these PGS are associated with area-level indicators of deprivation and economic performance. Study 2 will use PGS for BMI to examine whether the association between the ‘obesogenic’ environment (e.g., availability of fast food and green space) and obesity is genetically confounded and, further, whether the association between the environment and obesity differs according to genotype (gene-environment interaction). A further output of this project will be a wider bank of polygenic scores created for other researchers to use.
Principal applicant: Dr Karen Sugden
The global population is aging, and an increasing number of people are living with age-related disease and loss of function in their daily lives. As this population shift continues to manifest, identification of causes and consequences of accelerated aging, that is when an individual’s biological age is advancing faster than their chronological age, holds the potential to inform strategies on how to extend healthy lifespan and reduce burdens of age-related morbidity. An impediment to this is that there is currently no accepted gold standard measure of biological aging, and previous investigations of biological age and aging-related phenotypes have proven inconclusive. In this proposal, we will test a novel biomarker of the pace of biological aging, DunedinPACE, and three domains related to aging a) age-related disease, b) chronic pain, and c) activities of daily living to assess whether aging is accelerated as aging-related difficulties accumulate.