Natural selection contributes to the myopia epidemic

• 作者: Erping Long Jianzhi Zhang
• 来源期刊: 国家科学评论（英文版）
• 年，卷（期）: 2021,（6）
• 所属期刊栏目: RESEARCH ARTICLES
• 页码范围: 122-129
• 页数: 8页
• 语种: 英文
• DOI: 10.1093/nsr/nwaa175

摘要

The prevalence of myopia,or nearsightedness,has skyrocketed in the past few decades,creating a public health crisis that is commonly attributed to lifestyle changes.Here we report an overall increase in the frequencies of myopia-associated mutant alleles over 25 years among participants of the UK Biobank.Although myopia itself appears to be selected against,many of the mutant alleles are associated with reproductive benefits,suggesting that reproduction-related selection inadvertently contributes to the myopia epidemic.We estimate that,in the UK alone,natural selection adds more than 100000 myopia cases per generation,and argue that antagonistic pleiotropy be broadly considered in explaining the spreads of apparently disadvantageous phenotypes in humans and beyond.