Polygenic architecture of mental illness. Recent discoveries and future potential

Overall abstractDespite the fact that most psychiatric disorders are highly heritable (estimated to 60-80%), only a small fraction of genetic variance has been identified despite recent large GWAS. This ‘missing... [ view full abstract ]

Overall abstract

Despite the fact that most psychiatric disorders are highly heritable (estimated to 60-80%), only a small fraction of genetic variance has been identified despite recent large GWAS. This ‘missing heritability’ has been attributed to lack of proper statistical methods for analysis of the ‘polygenic architecture’. Thus, there is a need for innovative statistical approaches to enhance discovery of common variants. We have recently developed ‘enrichment tools’, a statistical framework for analyzing GWAS data building on Bayesian methods. Also, by using leveraging pleiotropy, i.e. genetic associations between two phenotypes from independent GWAS, the power for detecting small genetic effects is substantially increased, and novel susceptibility loci can be discovered. Current work is focusing on improving these methods.