Immune markers mediate genetic relationships between immune diseases and psychiatric disorders

This study explored the genetic links between 11 immune-mediated diseases and 13 psychiatric disorders, addressing the limited understanding of the underlying biological mechanisms linking these illnesses. Utilizing genomic structural equation modeling, we investigated whether the genetic liability for 14 immune markers (e.g., C-reactive protein [CRP], interleukin-6 [IL-6]) mediated associations between latent genomic factors of immune-mediated diseases (e.g., autoimmune) and psychiatric disorders (e.g., internalizing). While the literature extensively describes the psychiatric relevance of CRP, results indicated this is better explained by its biological precursor, IL-6. This is evidenced by highly attenuated associations of psychiatric traits with CRP when accounting for overlapping signal of IL6. Overall, the genetic liability of six immune markers significantly mediated 11 psychiatric-immune disease genetic relationships. For example, IL-6 mediated 60% of the genetic link between an internalizing factor and Crohn’s disease. Identified markers often evinced mediating effects for multiple disorder clusters and many immune-psychiatric relationships were mediated by multiple markers. At the same time, highlighting their diagnostic relevance, only a subset of examined immune markers were significant mediators. These findings provide mechanistic insight by pinpointing the immune markers that may be most critical to the psychiatric-immune disease link, which notably did not include CRP.