The largest personality GWAS to date (de Moor et al. 2011) (n=17 375) failed to replicate associated SNPs from the first GWAS of personality which had shown some of their top SNPs to be within/near genes putatively involved in psychiatric illness; nor did this study confirm previously reported associations for neuroticism. Neuroticism is a strong risk factor for anxiety, but no GWAS of general anxiety has been published yet. Various GWAS for major depression exist, the largest included 5763 cases and 6901 controls (Wray et al. 2010). No SNPs exceeded genome-wide significance, but there was some support for ADCY3, GAL and CAGNA1C genes. Genetic studies based on continuous measures of depressive symptoms in normal populations have also had some success. A linkage study of the depression subscale of the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale reported a potentially linked chromosomal region on 11q which their follow-up population-based association analysis suggested was partly explained by the OPCML or APLP2 genes (Schol-Gelok et al. 2010). The present study is the first GWAS of symptoms of anxiety and depression sampled from the general population.
