title: Genetic link between family socioeconomic status and children's educational achievement estimated from genome-wide SNPs.
abstract: One of the best predictors of children's educational achievement is their family's socioeconomic status (SES), but the degree to which this association is genetically mediated remains unclear. For 3000 UK-representative unrelated children we found that genome-wide single-nucleotide polymorphisms could explain a third of the variance of scores on an age-16 UK national examination of educational achievement and half of the correlation between their scores and family SES. Moreover, genome-wide polygenic scores based on a previously published genome-wide association meta-analysis of total number of years in education accounted for ~3.0% variance in educational achievement and ~2.5% in family SES. This study provides the first molecular evidence for substantial genetic influence on differences in children's educational achievement and its association with family SES.
authors.affiliation: King's College London, MRC Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, London, UK.
authors.forename: E
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Krapohl
authors.affiliation: King's College London, MRC Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, London, UK.
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Plomin
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D004522:Educational Status; D005190:Family; D005260:Female; D055106:Genome-Wide Association Study; D005838:Genotype; D006801:Humans; D007360:Intelligence; D008297:Male; D020412:Multifactorial Inheritance / Q000235:genetics*; D020411:Oligonucleotide Array Sequence Analysis; D020641:Polymorphism, Single Nucleotide / Q000235:genetics*; D012923:Social Class; D006113:United Kingdom