WIKIMEDIA, JOHN A. BEALIt’s a good week for scientists who study psychiatric disorders. Not only has the number of known genetic variants linked with schizophrenia more than tripled, thanks to a massive genome-wide association study published today (July 22) in Nature, but a philanthropist has also announced he will donate $650 million to psychiatric research.
First, the study: Analyzing the genomes of about 150,000 participants, nearly 37,000 of whom were diagnosed with schizophrenia, scientists have now identified 108 variants tied to the psychiatric disorder.
“While the suspect variation identified so far only explains only about 3.5 percent of the risk for schizophrenia, these results warrant exploring whether using such data to calculate an individual’s risk for developing the disorder might someday be useful in screening for preventive interventions,” Thomas Insel, the director of the National Institute of Mental Health, which helped fund the study, said in a press release. “Even based on these early predictors, people who score in the top 10 percent of risk may be up to 20-fold more prone to developing schizophrenia.”
The genes that shook out ...
