Common genetic variants shared among five major psychiatric disorders: a genome-wide combined analysis

Lu Xia, Kun Xia, Daniel Weinberger, Fengyu Zhang

Genetic correlation and pleiotropic effects among psychiatric disorders have been implicated. Xia et al. conducted a large genome-wide combined analysis of p-value for about 8 million single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in samples about 151,672 cases of schizophrenia, bipolar, major depressive disorder, attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder, and autism spectrum disorder and equivalent 284,444 controls of European ancestry based on the data from the latest genome-wide association studies; they found that SNPs mapped to 336 loci were shared by three adult psychiatric disorders (schizophrenia, bipolar and major depressive disorder), 73 loci shared by childhood disorders, and 47 genes by all five disorders at a genome-wide significance. A large number of SNPs were found in the extended major histocompatibility complex (MHC) for three adult disorders, but none of them was shared by two childhood disorders. The SNPs shared by all five disorders were located in the regions that have been identified as containing copy number variation associated with autism and had largely neurodevelopmental functions. In addition, some of those genes have been implicated for Alzheimer’s diseases (AD) and Parkinson’s disease (PD). This study provides a valuable list of genes from which to investigate genetic mechanism or gene-gene interaction on the development of neuropsychiatric disorders.

Reference:

L Xia, K Xia, DR Weinberger, F Zhang. Common Genetic Variants Shared among Five Major Psychiatric Disorders: A Large-scale Genome-wide Combined analysis. Glob Clin Transl Res. 2019; 1(1):21-30. HTML PDF Supplementary