Lam M, Chen CY, Li Z, Martin AR, Bryois J, Ma X, Gaspar H, Ikeda M, Benyamin B, Brown BC, Liu R, Zhou W, Guan L, Kamatani Y, Kim SW, Kubo M, Kusumawardhani AAAA, Liu CM, Ma H, Periyasamy S, Takahashi A, Xu Z, Yu H, Zhu F, Chen WJ, Faraone S, Glatt SJ, He L, Hyman SE, Hwu HG, McCarroll SA, Neale BM, Sklar P, Wildenauer DB, Yu X, Zhang D, Mowry BJ, Lee J, Holmans P, Xu S, Sullivan PF, Ripke S, O'Donovan MC, Daly MJ, Qin S, Sham P, Iwata N, Hong KS, Schwab SG, Yue W, Tsuang M, Liu J, Ma X, Kahn RS, Shi Y, Huang H. Comparative genetic architectures of schizophrenia in East Asian and European populations. Nat Genet. 2019 Nov 18.

Citation

Lam M, Chen CY, Li Z, Martin AR, Bryois J, Ma X, Gaspar H, Ikeda M, Benyamin B, Brown BC, Liu R, Zhou W, Guan L, Kamatani Y, Kim SW, Kubo M, Kusumawardhani AAAA, Liu CM, Ma H, Periyasamy S, Takahashi A, Xu Z, Yu H, Zhu F, Chen WJ, Faraone S, Glatt SJ, He L, Hyman SE, Hwu HG, McCarroll SA, Neale BM, Sklar P, Wildenauer DB, Yu X, Zhang D, Mowry BJ, Lee J, Holmans P, Xu S, Sullivan PF, Ripke S, O'Donovan MC, Daly MJ, Qin S, Sham P, Iwata N, Hong KS, Schwab SG, Yue W, Tsuang M, Liu J, Ma X, Kahn RS, Shi Y, Huang H. 2019. Comparative genetic architectures of schizophrenia in East Asian and European populations. Nature genetics. 51(12):1670-1678. Pubmed: 31740837 DOI:10.1038/s41588-019-0512-x

Abstract

Schizophrenia is a debilitating psychiatric disorder with approximately 1% lifetime risk globally. Large-scale schizophrenia genetic studies have reported primarily on European ancestry samples, potentially missing important biological insights. Here, we report the largest study to date of East Asian participants (22,778 schizophrenia cases and 35,362 controls), identifying 21 genome-wide-significant associations in 19 genetic loci. Common genetic variants that confer risk for schizophrenia have highly similar effects between East Asian and European ancestries (genetic correlation = 0.98 ± 0.03), indicating that the genetic basis of schizophrenia and its biology are broadly shared across populations. A fixed-effect meta-analysis including individuals from East Asian and European ancestries identified 208 significant associations in 176 genetic loci (53 novel). Trans-ancestry fine-mapping reduced the sets of candidate causal variants in 44 loci. Polygenic risk scores had reduced performance when transferred across ancestries, highlighting the importance of including sufficient samples of major ancestral groups to ensure their generalizability across populations.

Related Faculty

Steven Hyman, M.D.

Hyman Research

Steven Hyman is Director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute and Chair of the Schizophrenia Spectrum Biomarkers Consortium (SSBC), a consortium identifying objective biomarkers to enable better diagnosis of and treatment for schizophrenia and related illnesses.