Investigating the genetic and environmental aetiologies of non-suicidal and suicidal self-harm: a twin study
This is one of my PhD project, where I employed twin modelling, a structural equation modelling approach to study the aetiology of self-harm and its genetic and environmental relationship with other mental health conditions.
The html version for the step-by-step analysis script can be found here.
Applying this method on a longitudinal twin dataset with ~9000 twins, we found that suicidal and non-suicidal self-harm have high genetic correlation, and their share the same degree of genetic and environmental relationships with a range of mental health conditions.
Figure showing proportion of genetic (A), shared-environment (C) and non-shared environmental (E) components which explain the correlation between each mental health condition with suicidal self-harm (SSH) and non-suicidal self-harm (NSSH).
Figure showing the genetic (rg) and unique environmental (re) correlations between each mental health condition with NSSH and SSH.
