Nausea and vomiting during pregnancy (NVP) is an extremely common condition in pregnancy (70% prevalence) that may affect the psychosocial functioning of affected women. There is an increased prevalence of major depressive disorder prior to pregnancy among women with severe NVP and NVP is a risk factor of postnatal depression. There is evidence from different methodological approaches that NVP is highly heritable.
The NVP Genetics Consortium is a collaborative project that aims to identify the causes of NVP. One of the goals is to to identify novel genetic variants associated with NVP by carrying out a genome-wide association study (GWAS) meta-analysis on the presence of NVP.
These analyses include data from 27,631 women from participating cohorts (QIMR, Australia; MTR, Spain; ALSPAC, United Kigdom; EGCUT, Estonia). Each cohort ran GWAS for NVP severity (with the exception of EGcut which analysed HG case status) including age and age2 at time of interview, and the first four ancestry principal components as covariates. Meta-analysis is currently underpowered (we are awaiting data from two additional large samples).
Within the current results we see a suggestive intronic signal (1e-07) with CERS6
(2q24.3) a gene that is implicated in weight gain and glucose intolerance (in
mice). We also see a suggestive intronic signal (7e-07) within SLC39A12
(10p12.33) a Zinc transporter implicated in carbohydrate and lipid metabolism.
These results are an important first step toward understanding which genes are
associated with NVP. Future directions involve a larger meta-analysis and use of multivariate GWAS to investigate the potential genetic variants influencing NVP and other phenotypes.
