Lehto K, et al. - Researchers investigated if there exists a common genetic susceptibility for asthma and depression, anxiety, and high neuroticism (affective traits). The study sample consisted of an adult cohort identified from the Swedish Twin Registry who completed questionnaire-based health evaluations (n=23,693) and genotyping (n=15,908). The genetic analyses conducted included assessment of: polygenic risk scores (PRS) for affective traits, which were used as predictors of asthma in the cohort, and genome-wide association results from UK Biobank, which were used in linkage-disequilibrium score regression (LDSC) to quantify genetic correlations between asthma and affective traits. According to findings, questionnaire-based asthmas was linked to affective traits. Furthermore, asthma was more likely to develop among study participants in the highest neuroticism PRS quartile vs those in the lowest quartile. The investigators also found genetic correlations between depression and asthma, but not for anxiety or neuroticism. Based on findings, shared genetic influences between asthma and depression (LDSC) and neuroticism (PRS), but not anxiety, could partly be responsible for the observed comorbidity between asthma and these affective traits.