Loading...
Because the pathophysiology of psychiatric illnesses is unknown, clinicians distinguish among them by symptom patterns and course of illness. In this groundbreaking analysis of genome-wide association studies (33,332 psychiatric cases and 27,888 controls of European ancestry), investigators did the following:
Searched for common single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) across five disorders (autism, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder [ADHD]);
Reexamined possible diagnostic overlaps among SNPs previously associated with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia;
Used polygenic risk scores based on SNPs to analyze overlap in different combinations of the five disorders; and
Validated results by c…