In a study published in the journal Cell, scientists from the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium analyzed genetic data from over 600,000 people to see if they could identify genetic variants that increase the risk for one or more psychiatric disorders to study how the variants may contribute to a broad spectrum of mental health disorders. The study included genetic data from more than 490,000 healthy control subjects and over 230,000 individuals diagnosed with at least one common psychiatric disorder. Data generated for the 1000 Genomes project was included in the analysis. The researchers identified over 100 genetic variants that affect the risk for more than one psychiatric disorder and found that many variants are shared among certain classes of disorders including mood and psychotic disorders, neurodevelopmental disorders, and disorders characterized by compulsive behaviors. An important finding of the study is that certain genetic variants may have widespread influence on the risk for psychiatric disorders, which could be beneficial for developing new treatments and therapies.
For more information, a short summary can be found on ScienceDaily. The complete research article, “Genomic Relationships, Novel Loci, and Pleiotropic Mechanisms across Eight Psychiatric Disorders.” by Lee et al., was published in Cell.
