Genetic Correlation Analysis Suggests Association between Increased Self-Reported Sleep Duration in Adults and Schizophrenia and Type 2 Diabetes

Study objectives: We sought to examine how much of the heritability of self-report sleep duration is tagged by common genetic variation in populations of European ancestry and to test if the common variants contributing to sleep duration are also associated with other diseases and traits.

Methods: We utilized linkage disequilibrium (LD)-score regression to estimate the heritability tagged by common single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the CHARGE consortium genome-wide association study (GWAS) of self-report sleep duration. We also used bivariate LD-score regression to investigate the genetic correlation of sleep duration with other publicly available GWAS datasets.

Results: We show that 6% (SE = 1%) of the variance in self-report sleep duration in the CHARGE study is tagged by common SNPs in European populations. Furthermore, we find evidence of a positive genetic correlation (rG) between sleep duration and type 2 diabetes (rG = 0.26, P = 0.02), and between sleep duration and schizophrenia (rG = 0.19, P = 0.01).

Conclusions: Our results show that increased sample sizes will identify more common variants for self-report sleep duration; however, the heritability tagged is small when compared to other traits and diseases. These results also suggest that those who carry variants that increase risk to type 2 diabetes and schizophrenia are more likely to report longer sleep duration.