Delighted to see our new paper on genetics of all things brain out in @sciencemagazine! Six years' worth of effort at @broadinstitute and @StanleyCenter, looked at genomic data from 265,000 patients and 784,000 controls across 25 brain disorders. science.sciencemag.org/content/360/63…
@broadinstitute brief explainer can be found here: broadinstitute.org/news/psychiatr…
First of all, *many* people to thank for helping out with this massive project; Hilary Finucane, Brendan Bulik-Sullivan, @raymondkwalters, @padgorm, @CChurchhouse, @jorsmo, @patrickaturley, @APalotie, @PGCgenetics, @kzoosi and of course the project PIs Aiden Corvin and @bmneale
Things we learned: psychiatric disorders share a lot of their heritability with each other; some of this was known in prior work, but we extend that considerably in both sample size and disorders studied. Most connected: depression, ADHD, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia
In contrast, only neurological disorder to show significant sharing of genetic risk with psychiatric disorders was migraine; linked to ADHD, major depression and Tourette syndrome. Neurological disorders also did not show significant genetic sharing with each other, either
Looking at genetic correlations between disorders and other brain-related measures, we saw significant connections between cognitive abilities (e.g. educational attainment) and psychiatric disorders - ADHD, anxiety disorders and major depression negatively so, while anorexia...
...nervosa, autism spectrum disorders, bipolar disorder and OCD were significantly correlated with more education and/or college attainment. As we analyzed genetic risk factors only, implication is that some same factors drive both outcomes, ...
...not that the disorders themselves make you do better or worse at school. Some deeper mechanism likely at play connecting outcomes in both psych and cognitive performance in general, which is exciting!
Similarly interesting is the correlation between genetic factors associated with lower results in cognitive measures at early age, and those associated with an increased risk for later onset neurological disorders, like Alzheimer's, ischemic stroke and intracranial hemorrhage
For personality measures, from the "Big Five" personality measures neuroticism was correlated to some degree with every psychiatric condition studied, and significantly with 5 of them (and migraine). Otherwise no significant links.
Additional results seen for connection between smoking initiation and ADHD/major depression, suggesting the link is genetic and not just environmental, as smoking is fairly common among psychiatric patients, and BMI with several psychiatric disorders.
Many other findings as well, such as showing that average age of onset of a brain disorders correlates with how heritable the disorder is. Main takeaway is, though, that cooperation and collaboration (>570 authors and >600 institutes involved!) in science is the best way forward!
