Genetic influences on schizophrenia and subcortical brain volumes: large-scale proof of concept.

Franke B, Stein JL, Ripke S, Anttila V, Hibar DP, van Hulzen KJ, Arias-Vasquez A, Smoller JW, Nichols TE, Neale MC, McIntosh AM, Lee P, McMahon FJ, Meyer-Lindenberg A, Mattheisen M, Andreassen OA, Gruber O, Sachdev PS, Roiz-Santiañez R, Saykin AJ, Ehrlich S, Mather KA, Turner JA, Schwarz E, Thalamuthu A, Yao Y, Ho YY, Martin NG, Wright MJ, Schizophrenia Working Group of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium , Psychosis Endophenotypes International Consortium , Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium 2 , Enigma Consortium , O'Donovan MC, Thompson PM, Neale BM, Medland SE, Sullivan PF

Nat. Neurosci. 19 (3) 420-431 [2016-03-00; online 2016-02-09]

Schizophrenia is a devastating psychiatric illness with high heritability. Brain structure and function differ, on average, between people with schizophrenia and healthy individuals. As common genetic associations are emerging for both schizophrenia and brain imaging phenotypes, we can now use genome-wide data to investigate genetic overlap. Here we integrated results from common variant studies of schizophrenia (33,636 cases, 43,008 controls) and volumes of several (mainly subcortical) brain structures (11,840 subjects). We did not find evidence of genetic overlap between schizophrenia risk and subcortical volume measures either at the level of common variant genetic architecture or for single genetic markers. These results provide a proof of concept (albeit based on a limited set of structural brain measures) and define a roadmap for future studies investigating the genetic covariance between structural or functional brain phenotypes and risk for psychiatric disorders.

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PubMed 26854805

DOI 10.1038/nn.4228

Crossref 10.1038/nn.4228

pii: nn.4228
pmc: PMC4852730
mid: NIHMS747616