Mònica Bayés, Programme Manager at the CNAG, participates in the largest genetic study carried out on psychiatric disorders

Mònica Bayés, Programme Manager at the CNAG, participates in the largest genetic study carried out on psychiatric disorders. The study, published in Nature Genetics, analyses the five most common psychiatric disorders with greater impact at a personal and social level: schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism, found out that there is a shared genetic basis between some of these diseases.

 

International Consortium involving more than 300 experts
This study, involving 250 experts from more than 300 institutions around the world, is driven by the Psychiatric Genomic Consortium. The Spanish contribution is led by the researchers from the Vall d’Hebron Institut de Recerca (VHIR) Miguel Casas, Josep Antoni Ramos-Quiroga and Marta Ribasés through the International Multicentre persistent ADHD Collaboration Consortium (IMPACT). This group, which also involves Bru Cormand from the Department of Genetics of the Universitat de Barcelona-CIBERER and Mònica Bayés from the CNAG, has contributed to the study with genetic data of ADHD patients and control individuals collected through another specific ADHD study.

 

A GWAS study, unique in psychiatry, including more than 75,000 people
The publication describes the changes in a single DNA nucleotide (Single nucleotide polymorphisms, SNPs) that are the most common in the human genome in more the 75,000 individuals. This is the first scientific publication based on genome-wide association studies (GWAS) to identify the genetic base shared between psychiatric pathologies. The study found that common genetic variations (SNPs) explain between 17-29% of the phenotypes under study in the five diseases.

 

The study found out that there is a strong genetic correlation between SNP associated with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, a moderate correlation between schizophrenia and major depression, between bipolar disorder and major depression and between ADHD and major depression, whereas the correlation is much lower among schizophrenia and autism and between ADHD and autism.

 

Work of reference:

Genetic relationship between five psychiatric disorders estimated from genome-wide SNPs