So are you hoping to be treated by nurses who are worse academically than the ones we have now? Or are you hoping that "others" will be treated by them while increased supply depresses wages for the good ones that you think will treat you? Also being a nurse is a very hard job, most people wouldn't last a year as an ER nurse in the US.

Access to full text: https://rdcu.be/d210J

Our team is excited to share our paper in Nature Human Behaviour. We investigated whether genetic predisposition (polygenic scores, or PGS) for 17 neuropsychiatric traits—ranging from mental health disorders like ADHD to personality traits such as agreeableness—might influence membership in 22 broad professional categories (e.g., “Computers & Math”).

Key questions: 1. Does higher genetic load for any of these traits increase the likelihood of entering certain professions? 2. Do these findings still hold when excluding individuals with any neuropsychiatric disorder diagnosis?

Main Findings 1. Weak but Significant Associations: Despite significance across multiple trait-profession pairs, each neuropsychiatric trait’s PGS explained less than 0.4% of variation in individual professional membership. 2. Stronger Influence from Age and Sex: Age accounted for around 21% of variance, and sex 7%, overshadowing the influence of genetic predisposition. 3. No “GATTACA” Scenario: Our data suggest that neuropsychiatric trait PGS currently can’t predict career outcomes—nor is it likely to become a robust predictor in the future displacing traditional assessments.

Motivations & Broader Context 1. Reducing Mental Health Stigma: Neuropsychiatric disorders are common and often highly heritable. Some risk variants could persist because they carry potential benefits under certain contexts. Our aim was to explore these potential “trade-offs” and contribute to a deeper understanding of how these common genetic factors shape our societies. For instance, our findings showed a positive association of ASD PGS with both “Computers & Math” and “Arts & design”. 2. Scientific Curiosity: We wanted to test whether neuropsychiatric PGS could serve as a strong predictor of professional membership. Our conclusion: not really—these scores cannot reliably forecast someone’s career path.

Further Insights 1. ADHD & Education: ADHD-related associations were largely mediated through educational attainment, which influenced career pathways. Notably, the gatekeeping “Education” profession itself had a negative association with ADHD PGS and a positive one with (contrasting) OCD PGS. Unfortunately, systemic modifiable biases in education may affect individuals with ADHD. 2. ASD & Management: “Management” showed a negative association with ASD PGS but a positive one with extraversion PGS—an intriguing contrast to “Computers & Math”—a finding that may resonate with frequent discussions about the social and organizational demands of tech management roles at HN.

Limitations of interest 1.We deliberately excluded intelligence, cognitive performance, and educational attainment PGS from our analyeses. 2. We chose more interpretable statistical approaches rather than complex machine-learning algorithms, as the goal was interpretability over prediction performance. 3. Future studies might use multivariate multiple regression approaches to uncover even more nuanced interactions.

Conclusion At the population level, there are small yet significant associations between neuropsychiatric trait PGS and professions. However, demographic factors—age, sex—and life circumstances dominate these outcomes. Genetic information alone won’t be a meaningful guide for career selection.

If you’d like to dive deeper please read the full article from the link shared at the top of the page.

Correspondence: georgios.voloudakis@mssm.edu (evoloution) panagiotis.roussos@mssm.edu

PS1: We hope this research helps reduce stigma around neurodivergence and mental health and spark further discussion on the complex interplay between genetics and life outcomes.

PS2: Figure 2 in our published paper has an error where the “Legal” data point was inadvertently removed (should overlap with horizontal dotted line just above “ga”); we plan to correct this soon.

There is a joke among scientists that choosing the career path will cost you your firstborn. It would be nice to quantify this but it is hard to. Anecdotally, main issue is financial stability so people with wealthy backgrounds or supportive (by time investment) families have a much easier time navigating this. I would be surprised if someone did the study and didn't find a delay till first-born child born when compared to similar people (SES background, abilities, etc) that went down the business/finance route. Edit:typo

What tanepiper is saying is mostly correct, especially the part that late-onset ADHD is not really a thing. Genetic condition is kind of an inaccurate statement, though, in my experience as a psychiatrist-scientist. You can liberally say that ADHD is ~75% [1] heritable (based on twin studies) which is pretty high. However, data suggest that even though DSM requires a binary definition of the disorder, in truth it is more like a spectrum and less like e.g. bipolar disorder type I which you either have or you don't despite the fact that severity may vary. For example in a recent study, we found that among people, a high polygenic score (PGS; a kind of way to score individuals for genetic liability based on published studies that associate genetic variants with a disorder) is associated with typical deficits in cognitive functions found in ADHD even in the absence of a diagnosis [1]. I conceptualize it as another lever within the natural variation of how brains work and are tuned for different environments.

Now visiting the late-onset part, I have mostly seen it in clinical practice in individuals who had ADHD traits already (may not have met diagnostic criteria) that got really worse after traumatic brain injury and/or worsening of a comorbid mental health conditions e.g. their anxiety or their depression. The natural progression of ADHD for most is to get better over the years as they develop compensatory habits and/or choose lines of work that make ADHD traits less of an obstacle; some believe that also brain maturation kind of catches up at some point which is an incomplete cure. However, the effects on confidence and self-perception are long-lasting...

Another misconception is that high IQ corrects for ADHD traits, this has been mostly rebutted in both clinical literature and we have a genetic study under review that mostly replicates that. Finally, there is an overlap in signs when comparing "bored" gifted individuals and ADHD individuals which can be confusing... Unfortunately, smart individuals with ADHD (of the inattentive type) get enough performance to fly below the radar of diagnosis which ultimately hurts them or delays them from realize "their full potential".

1. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41588-022-01285-8 and for open-access see manuscript at PMC: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10914347/