Nature Communications (Sep 2023)

Genome-wide association studies and cross-population meta-analyses investigating short and long sleep duration

  • Isabelle Austin-Zimmerman,
  • Daniel F. Levey,
  • Olga Giannakopoulou,
  • Joseph D. Deak,
  • Marco Galimberti,
  • Keyrun Adhikari,
  • Hang Zhou,
  • Spiros Denaxas,
  • Haritz Irizar,
  • Karoline Kuchenbaecker,
  • Andrew McQuillin,
  • the Million Veteran Program,
  • John Concato,
  • Daniel J. Buysse,
  • J. Michael Gaziano,
  • Daniel J. Gottlieb,
  • Renato Polimanti,
  • Murray B. Stein,
  • Elvira Bramon,
  • Joel Gelernter

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-41249-y
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 14, no. 1
pp. 1 – 15

Abstract

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Abstract Sleep duration has been linked to a wide range of negative health outcomes and to reduced life expectancy. We present genome-wide association studies of short ( ≤ 5 h) and long ( ≥ 10 h) sleep duration in adults of European (N = 445,966), African (N = 27,785), East Asian (N = 3141), and admixed-American (N = 16,250) ancestry from UK Biobank and the Million Veteran Programme. In a cross-population meta-analysis, we identify 84 independent loci for short sleep and 1 for long sleep. We estimate SNP-based heritability for both sleep traits in each ancestry based on population derived linkage disequilibrium (LD) scores using cov-LDSC. We identify positive genetic correlation between short and long sleep traits (rg = 0.16 ± 0.04; p = 0.0002), as well as similar patterns of genetic correlation with other psychiatric and cardiometabolic phenotypes. Mendelian randomisation reveals a directional causal relationship between short sleep and depression, and a bidirectional causal relationship between long sleep and depression.