Abstract

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 100,000 myopia cases per generation, and argue that antagonistic pleiotropy be broadly considered in explaining the spreads of apparently disadvantageous phenotypes in humans and beyond.

中文翻译：

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自然选择助长近视流行

摘要

在过去的几十年里，近视或近视的患病率猛增，造成了通常归因于生活方式改变的公共卫生危机。在这里，我们报告了近视相关突变等位基因频率在 25 年内英国生物银行参与者的总体增加。尽管近视本身似乎被选中，但许多突变等位基因与生殖益处有关，这表明与生殖相关的选择无意中导致了近视流行。我们估计，仅在英国，自然选择每代增加超过 100,000 例近视病例，并认为在解释明显不利的表型在人类及其他地区的传播时，应广泛考虑拮抗性多效性。