Phenome-wide screening of the putative causal determinants of depression using genetic data

Abstract Depression is one of the most common mental health disorders and one of the top causes of disability throughout the world. The present study sought to identify putative causal associations between depression and hundreds of complex human traits through a genome-wide screening of genetic data and a hypothesis-free approach. We leveraged genome-wide association studies summary statistics for depression and 1504 complex traits and investigated potential causal relationships using the latent causal variable method. We identified 559 traits genetically correlated with depression risk at FDR