Associations of Polygenic Risk for Depression, Traditional Chinese Medicine Constitution, and Depression: A Population‐Based Study in Taiwan

ABSTRACT To comprehensively investigate the risk factors associated with depression, traditional Chinese medicine constitution (TCMC) has been found to be related to depression. However, the underlying mechanism remains unclear. This study examined the association between the concept of unbalanced TCMCs and major depressive disorder (MDD), investigated the overlapping polygenic risks between unbalanced TCMC and MDD, and performed a mediation test to establish potential pathways. In total, 11,030 individuals were recruited from the Taiwan Biobank, and the polygenic risk score (PRS) for MDD for each participant was calculated using the data from the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium. Unbalanced TCMC were classified as yang‐deficiency, yin‐deficiency, and stasis. The MDD PRS was associated with yang‐deficiency odds ratio [OR] per standard deviation increase in standardized (PRS = 1.07, p = 0.0080), yin‐deficiency (OR = 1.07, p = 0.0030), and stasis constitution (OR = 1.06, p = 0.0331). Yang‐deficiency (OR = 2.07, p