| الوصف: |
Introduction: The link between poverty and mental illness has sparked discussions about the role of poverty as a risk factor for mental health. If poverty is indeed confirmed as a causal factor for mental illness, it would have profound implications for our comprehension of mental well-being and guide efforts to address the growing occurrence of mental health disorders. Methods: Building on the recent breakthrough discovery of heritability of poverty traits and utilizing large-scale genome-wide association studies of mental illness, we used Mendelian randomization (MR) and Genomic structural equation modeling to investigate evidence of causality of the relationship between poverty and mental illness. We examined nine distinct mental disorders, namely attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), anorexia nervosa (AN), anxiety disorders (ANX), autism spectrum disorders (ASD), bipolar disorder (BD), major depressive disorder (MDD), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and schizophrenia (SZ). Joint measures of poverty derived from household income (HI), occupational income (OI), and social deprivation (SD) were examined while accounting for the influence of cognitive ability (CA). Results: Our analysis highlights HI as the most pertinent poverty measure when compared to OI and SD. Bidirectional MR investigations of the poverty common factor was consistent with the existing paradigm that mental illness leads to poverty. New was evidence that poverty increases the likelihood of developing ADHD (Inverse Variance Weighted Odds Ratio [IVW OR]=4.26[95%CI:3.42-5.29]), MDD (IVW OR=1.49[95%CI:1.29-1.72]), and SZ (IVW OR=1.53[95%CI:1.35-1.73]), while decreasing the risk of AN (IVW OR=0.50[95%CI:0.40-0.62]). This support for a causal relation held strong after adjusting for CA, albeit with reduced effect sizes. Conclusion: Our research indicates that poverty plays a causal role in the development of SZ, MDD, and ADHD, while resulted inversely associated to risk of AN. Notably, CA explains a significant portion of the impact of poverty, echoing prior reports highlighting the contribution of impaired cognitive function to severe mental illnesses. Given that income and education are malleable factors in the population, our study provides compelling evidence to examine income-based policies as a means of promoting better mental health outcomes in the population. This underscores the importance of developing targeted interventions that address the root causes of mental illness and advance health equity. |
