Psychopathology in 7 ‐year‐old children: Differences in maternal and paternal ratings and the genetic epidemiology

The assessment of children's psychopathology is often based on parental report. Earlier studies have suggested that rater bias can affect the estimates of genetic, shared environmental and unique environmental influences on differences between children. The availability of a large dataset of maternal as well as paternal ratings of psychopathology in 7‐year old children enabled (i) the analysis of informant effects on these assessments, and (ii) to obtain more reliable estimates of the genetic and non‐genetic effects. DSM‐oriented measures of affective, anxiety, somatic, attention‐deficit/hyperactivity, oppositional‐defiant, conduct, and obsessive‐compulsive problems were rated for 12,310 twin pairs from the Netherlands Twin Register by mothers (N = 12,085) and fathers (N = 8,516). The effects of genetic and non‐genetic effects were estimated on the common and rater‐specific variance. For all scales, mean scores on maternal ratings exceeded paternal ratings. Parents largely agreed on the ranking of their child's problems (r 0.60–0.75). The heritability was estimated over 55% for maternal and paternal ratings for all scales, except for conduct problems (44–46%). Unbiased shared environmental influences, i.e., on the common variance, were significant for affective (13%), oppositional (13%), and conduct problems (37%). In clinical settings, different cutoffs for (sub)clinical scores could be applied to paternal and maternal ratings of their child's psy...

Source: American Journal of Medical Genetics Part B: Neuropsychiatric Genetics - September 30, 2016 Category: Genetics & Stem Cells Authors: Laura W. Wesseldijk, Iryna O. Fedko, Meike Bartels, Michel G. Nivard, Catharina E. M. van Beijsterveldt, Dorret I. Boomsma, Christel M. Middeldorp Tags: Research Article Source Type: research