Distinguishing vulnerability and resilience to posttraumatic stress disorder evaluating traumatic experiences, genetic risk and electronic health records

Psychiatry Res. 2024 Jul:337:115950. doi: 10.1016/j.psychres.2024.115950. Epub 2024 May 8.

Abstract

What distinguishes vulnerability and resilience to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) remains unclear. Levering traumatic experiences reporting, genetic data, and electronic health records (EHR), we investigated and predicted the clinical comorbidities (co-phenome) of PTSD vulnerability and resilience in the UK Biobank (UKB) and All of Us Research Program (AoU), respectively. In 60,354 trauma-exposed UKB participants, we defined PTSD vulnerability and resilience considering PTSD symptoms, trauma burden, and polygenic risk scores. EHR-based phenome-wide association studies (PheWAS) were conducted to dissect the co-phenomes of PTSD vulnerability and resilience. Significant diagnostic endpoints were applied as weights, yielding a phenotypic risk score (PheRS) to conduct PheWAS of PTSD vulnerability and resilience PheRS in up to 95,761 AoU participants. EHR-based PheWAS revealed three significant phenotypes positively associated with PTSD vulnerability (top association "Sleep disorders") and five outcomes inversely associated with PTSD resilience (top association "Irritable Bowel Syndrome"). In the AoU cohort, PheRS analysis showed a partial inverse relationship between vulnerability and resilience with distinct comorbid associations. While PheRSvulnerability associations were linked to multiple phenotypes, PheRSresilience showed inverse relationships with eye conditions. Our study unveils phenotypic differences in PTSD vulnerability and resilience, highlighting that these concepts are not simply the absence and presence of PTSD.

Keywords: All of Us Research Program; Phenome; Polygenic risk score; Posttraumatic stress disorder; Resilience; UK Biobank; Vulnerability.

MeSH terms

  • Adult
  • Aged
  • Comorbidity
  • Electronic Health Records* / statistics & numerical data
  • Female
  • Genetic Predisposition to Disease
  • Genome-Wide Association Study
  • Humans
  • Male
  • Middle Aged
  • Multifactorial Inheritance
  • Phenotype
  • Resilience, Psychological*
  • Sleep Wake Disorders / epidemiology
  • Stress Disorders, Post-Traumatic* / epidemiology
  • Stress Disorders, Post-Traumatic* / genetics
  • United Kingdom / epidemiology