Anxiety Working Group Leadership
Manuel Mattheisen, MD
Co-Chair
Core Analytical Group Co-Director
Data Access Committee Representative
Work with us!
If you have questions regarding the PGC ANX workgroup or projects that are currently being conducted, please contact the workgroup chairs.
For any questions or ideas related to research dissemination (e.g., via this webpage, social media, blogs, press outlets), please contact the workgroup outreach liaison.
If you have questions about how to access summary statistics or genotype-level data, or are interested to submit a secondary analysis proposal, please contact the workgroup data access committee representative.
About Us
Our History
After an initial meeting of the chairs at the WCPG 2016 in Jerusalem, the PGC Anxiety Workgroup became part of the PGC in 2017 with a kick-off meeting during WCPG 2017 in Orlando. Since then, our membership has grown to include over 30 groups from about 10 countries.
Our Motivation
We are conducting genome-wide association studies (GWAS) based on statistically powerful samples of patients with anxiety disorders and healthy individuals with data on anxiety measures. Our long-term objective is to provide further insight into the pathophysiology and neurobiological underpinnings of anxiety disorders through the identification of genetic risk variants, leading to the development of novel treatments or biomarkers.
Our analyses will include GWAS in (i) categorical case-control samples (panic disorder, agoraphobia, generalized anxiety disorder, social phobia and specific phobia), (ii) population based samples with dimensional anxiety measures (e.g. GAD-7, STAI, ACQ, ASI), and (iii) samples with information on response to treatment for anxiety disorders. We are also keen to aid parallel GWAS consortium efforts (CAPICE, EAGLE) on the development of anxiety disorders in childhood and adolescence, and to contribute to post-genomic research on anxiety, capitalising on genome sequence and epigenetic data.
Get Involved!
We welcome anyone who is interested to join us. We are eager to collaborate with investigators who might be willing to share raw phenotypic/genotypic/other omic data or genetic effect sizes via summary statistics.
We welcome anyone who is interested to join us. For further information please contact the workgroup co-chairs.
Publications
We posted our freeze1 GWAS meta-analysis on medRxiv:
Strom NI, Verhulst B, Bacanu SA ... Deckert J, Eley TC, Mattheisen M, Hettema JM. Genome-wide association study of major anxiety disorders in 122,341 European-ancestry cases identifies 58 loci and highlights GABAergic signaling. medRxiv July 2024 (preprint). PMID: 39006447
It is under review at Nature Genetics
Strom NI, Verhulst B, Bacanu SA ... Deckert J, Eley TC, Mattheisen M, Hettema JM. Genome-wide association study of major anxiety disorders in 122,341 European-ancestry cases identifies 58 loci and highlights GABAergic signaling. medRxiv July 2024 (preprint). PMID: 39006447
Levey DF, Gelernter J, Polimanti R, et al.: Reproducible genetic risk loci for anxiety: results from ∼200,000 participants in the Million Veteran Program. Am J Psychiatry 2020; 177:223–232
Meier SM, Trontti K, Purves KL, et al.: Genetic variants associated with anxiety and stress-related disorders: a genome-wide association study and mouse-model study. JAMA Psychiatry 2019 22;76(9):924-932
Forstner AJ, Awasthi S, Wolf C, et al.: Genome-wide association study of panic disorder reveals genetic overlap with neuroticism and depression. Mol Psychiatry 2019 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-019-0590-2
Purves, K.L., Coleman, J.R.I., Meier, S.M… et al.: A major role for common genetic variation in anxiety disorders. Molecular Psychiatry 2019. doi:10.1038/s41380-019-0559-1
Otowa T, Hek K, Lee M, et al.: Meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies of anxiety disorders. Mol Psychiatry 2016; 21:1485
Erhardt A, Akula N, Schumacher J, et al.: Replication and meta-analysis of TMEM132D gene variants in panic disorder. Transl Psychiatry 2012; 2:e156
Funders
