GWAS of educational attainment, phase 3: biological findings

Genetic factors are estimated to account for at least 20% of the variation across individuals for educational attainment (Rietveld et al., 2013). The results of the latest GWAS for educational attainment identified 74 genome-wide significant loci for educational attainment (Okbay et al., 2016). Here, in one of the largest GWAS to date, we increase our sample to nearly 750,000 individuals, and we identify over 600 genome-wide significant loci associated with the number of years of schooling completed. Note that at the time of presentation, we will likely have updated our meta-analysis to include over 1,000,000 individuals. In this presentation, I will focus on the biological implications of the GWAS results. At the time of writing, 1,656 genes are significantly prioritized, a more than 10-fold increase since our previous report (Okbay et al., 2016). The newly significant results reinforce the biological theme of prenatal brain development and also bring to the foreground new themes that shed light on the biological underpinnings of cognitive performance and other traits affecting educational attainment.