Cookies on this website

We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you click 'Accept all cookies' we'll assume that you are happy to receive all cookies and you won't see this message again. If you click 'Reject all non-essential cookies' only necessary cookies providing core functionality such as security, network management, and accessibility will be enabled. Click 'Find out more' for information on how to change your cookie settings.

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.

Original publication

DOI

10.1038/nn.4228

Type

Journal article

Journal

Nature neuroscience

Publication Date

03/2016

Volume

19

Pages

420 - 431

Addresses

Department of Human Genetics, Radboud University Medical Center, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

Keywords

Schizophrenia Working Group of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium, ENIGMA Consortium, Brain, Humans, Genetic Predisposition to Disease, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Organ Size, Schizophrenia, Linkage Disequilibrium, Polymorphism, Single Nucleotide, Genome-Wide Association Study, Endophenotypes, Neuroimaging