While it’s clear that brain disorders are often inherited, finding exactly which genes are responsible for passing them along is challenging. In a study published today in Science, an international consortium of hundreds of scientists assembled genome-wide association study data for 25 psychiatric and neurological disorders and found that 10 mental illnesses share genetic variants that contribute to the risk of their development. The authors suggest that identifying these similarities could lead to a greater understanding of what causes mental disorders and affect how clinicians diagnose and treat patients.
“In the field of psychiatric genetics, we have been seeing common underlying genes across [psychiatric disorders] for some years now,” says Consuelo Walss-Bass, a psychiatric geneticist at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston who did not participate in the study. “However, it’s still a very important paper in that it shows that in such a large sample. We ...
