Seminar Series: Philipp Koellinger

Risky behaviors and their links with health: New insights from statistically well-powered genetic and neuroscientific studies

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Health outcomes are often partly heritable, genetically complex, and related to normal-range variations in behavior, socio-economic outcomes, and personality. Relationships between such normal-range variation with health outcomes can be exploited to gain new insights into the etiology of diseases. Here, we demonstrate this general principle with results from large-scale genome-wide and brain-wide association studies on risk tolerance and we explore their links with several mental health outcomes including excessive alcohol consumption. Our analyses are based on over one million genotyped individuals and more than 12,000 anatomical brain scans, allowing us to conduct statistically well-powered analyses that yield replicable results and precise estimates of effect sizes.