Studying genes related to quality of life can be complicated, but the Covid-19 pandemic allowed researchers at the University of Groningen, Netherlands, to investigate how this stressful, worldwide event interacted with a person’s genetics to affect their overall well-being.
The new study, published in the open-access journal PLOS Genetics, screened the genomes of more than 27,000 participants in the Netherlands.
Then they looked for connections between genetic variants and the participants’ responses to a series of questionnaires about lifestyle and mental and physical health given over 10 months, starting in March 2020.
The researchers found that
some individuals had a genetic tendency toward better well-being than others during the pandemic.
Additionally, as the pandemic wore on, they found that genetic tendency had an increasingly powerful influence on how those people perceived their quality of life, potentially due to the social isolation required by strict Covid-19 containment measures.
Moreover, the findings demonstrate that the contribution of genetics to complex traits like well-being can change over time.
“The Covid-19 pandemic has been a unique opportunity to investigate the impact of genetics on well-being in a time wherein we had to socially isolate ourselves,” said Robert Warmerdam from the varsity.
“We found that it is during the first, stressful year of the pandemic that it is our nature that has gained relative impact on how we rate our lives,” he added.
Source: IANS
