Spouses tend to share same psychiatric disorders across three countries and generations

Birds of a feather flock together. Do these spouses help each other? Is it beneficial?

"Spouses tend to share psychiatric disorders, per a massive study in Nature Human Behaviour of ~15 million people in Taiwan, Denmark, and Sweden that shows the trend increases with each decade, across cultures, and generation."

"People with a psychiatric disorder are more likely to marry someone who has the same condition than to partner with someone who doesn’t, according to a massive study suggesting that the pattern persists across cultures and generations.

Researchers had previously noted this trend in Nordic countries, but the phenomenon has seldom been investigated outside Europe. ..."

From the abstract:

"Trait similarities between spouses are a key factor that shapes the landscape of complex human traits. The driving force behind the spousal correlations can increase the overall prevalence of disorders, influence occurrences of comorbidities and bias estimations of genetic architectures. However, there is a lack of large-scale studies examining cultural differences and generational trends in spousal correlations for psychiatric disorders.

Focusing on three national registries, we performed a large-scale analysis on spousal correlations across nine psychiatric disorders. We obtained the trait correlations from five million spousal pairs in Taiwan and then compared them with estimates from the Danish national registry (571,534 pairs) and with published results from the Swedish national registry (707,263 pairs). Generational changes in Taiwan for people born after the 1930s were investigated as well. We found that a majority of psychiatric disorders have consistent spousal correlations across nations and over generations, indicating their importance in the population dynamics of psychiatric disorders."

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Spouses tend to share psychiatric disorders, massive study finds "Analysis of almost 15 million people shows the trend increases with each decade, across cultures and generations."

Spousal correlations for nine psychiatric disorders are consistent across cultures and persistent over generations (no public access)

Assortative mating across nine psychiatric disorders is consistent and persistent over cultures and generations (preprint, public access)

Fig. 1 Spousal correlations across nine psychiatric disorders, estimates from Taiwan versus those from Nordic countries (Denmark and Sweden).