Shared genetic correlations of psychiatric and neurologic disorders
A few weeks an interesting preprint from Antilla et al. was published. They set out to measure the genetic correlation between a variety of brain disorders -- both "psychiatric" and "neurologic" -- by comparing risk markers from a set of 23 different GWAS's. They called themselves the "Brainstorm consortium" (for which they win creativity points). A major finding in their paper is that there is a substantial correlation between psychiatric disorders (e.g., OCD, schizophrenia, MDD, bipolar disorder), while there is less or no correlation among neurologic disorders (e.g., Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, MS). This data set is based on comparing polygenic risk variants from individual studies, and it's certainly possible to draw too strong of conclusions from this type of data, as it is confounded by the societal structure of the people who participated in the studies, among other factors. That said, this should stimulate a number of interesting follow-up studies. One of their most interesting sections is on the genetic correlations between these disorders and other traits:
doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/048991
Two correlations especially jump out to me here:
The positive correlation between autism spectrum disorder risk and variants associated with measures of cognitive performance. This fits with at least one finding that there is a positive association between ASD prevalence and socioeconomic status, which is sometimes attributed to increased paternal age, but as this study shows, that is potentially not the whole story. I'm certainly not an expert in ASD epidemiology and this is just my initial impression, and I could totally be off.
The inverse correlation between variants associated with measures of cognitive performance and risk of stroke and intracerebral hemorrage. This fits with my priors that good blood flow is critical for proper brain function. In my experience is not as widely known by people without a medical background (such as myself prior to my preclinical med school training).
Reference
Antilla et al. 2016 Analysis of shared heritability in common disorders of the brain. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/048991