RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Association of polygenic risk for major psychiatric illness with subcortical volumes and white matter integrity in UK Biobank
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 080283
DO 10.1101/080283
A1 LM Reus
A1 X Shen
A1 J Gibson
A1 E Wigmore
A1 L Ligthart
A1 MJ Adams
A1 G Davies
A1 SR Cox
A1 SP Hagenaars
A1 ME Bastin
A1 IJ Deary
A1 HC Whalley
A1 AM McIntosh
YR 2016
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/10/12/080283.abstract
AB Major depressive disorder (MDD), schizophrenia (SCZ) and bipolar disorder (BP) are common, disabling and heritable psychiatric diseases with a complex overlapping polygenic architecture. Individuals with these disorders, as well as their unaffected relatives, show widespread structural differences in corticostriatal and limbic networks. Structural variation in many of these brain regions is also heritable and polygenic but whether their genetic architecture overlaps with major psychiatric disorders is unknown. We sought to address this issue by examining the impact of polygenic risk of MDD, SCZ, and BP on subcortical brain volumes and white matter (WM) microstructure in a large single sample of neuroimaging data; the UK Biobank Imaging study. The first release of UK Biobank imaging data compromised participants with overlapping genetic data and subcortical volumes (N = 978) and WM measures (N = 816). Our, findings however, indicated no statistically significant associations between either subcortical volumes or WM microstructure, and polygenic risk for MDD, SCZ or BP. In the current study, we found little or no evidence for genetic overlap between major psychiatric disorders and structural brain measures. These findings suggest that subcortical brain volumes and WM microstructure may not be closely linked to the genetic mechanisms of major psychiatric disorders.