Back

Does Toxoplasma gondii infection have a causal impact on human psychopathology? A Mendelian randomization analysis

Pang, J.; Valente, M. J.; Kim, K.; Liu, X.

2025-11-30 infectious diseases
10.1101/2025.11.27.25341156 medRxiv
Show abstract

Toxoplasma gondii (T. gondii) is a prevalent zoonotic parasite that has been implicated in influencing human psychiatric disorders and risk-taking behaviors. Using genome-wide association study (GWAS) data, we conducted two-sample Mendelian randomization (MR) analyses to investigate the potential causal relationship between T. gondii infection and the aforementioned psychiatric disorders and risk-taking behaviors. Contrary to previous epidemiological evidence, our MR analyses do not support a significant causal association between T. gondii infection and the studied psychiatric disorders or risk-taking behaviors. These findings challenge the hypothesis that chronic T. gondii influences human psychopathology and behavior.

Published in PLOS Pathogens · training set

Matching journals

The top 2 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.