Polygenic risk scores in psychiatry: Will they be useful for clinicians? [version 1; peer review: 4 approved]

Major psychiatric disorders are heritable but they are genetically complex. This means that, with certain exceptions, single gene markers will not be helpful for diagnosis. However, we are learning more about the large number of gene variants that, in combination, are associated with risk for disord...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:F1000 research 2019, Vol.8, p.1293
Main Authors: Fullerton, Janice M, Nurnberger, John I
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Bipolar disorder
Bipolar Disorder - genetics
Collaboration
Consortia
Deoxyribonucleic acid
DNA
Gene expression
Gene loci
Genetic Predisposition to Disease
Genomes
Genomics
Genotype & phenotype
Humans
Mental disorders
Mental Disorders - genetics
Multifactorial Inheritance
Population
Power
Psychiatry
Review
Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia - genetics
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Summary:Major psychiatric disorders are heritable but they are genetically complex. This means that, with certain exceptions, single gene markers will not be helpful for diagnosis. However, we are learning more about the large number of gene variants that, in combination, are associated with risk for disorders such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and other psychiatric conditions. The presence of those risk variants may now be combined into a polygenic risk score (PRS). Such a score provides a quantitative index of the genomic burden of risk variants in an individual, which relates to the likelihood that a person has a particular disorder. Currently, such scores are quite useful in research, and they are telling us much about the relationships between different disorders and other indices of brain function. In the future, as the datasets supporting the development of such scores become larger and more diverse and as methodological developments improve predictive capacity, we expect that PRS will have substantial clinical utility in the assessment of risk for disease, subtypes of disease, and even treatment response. Here, we provide an overview of PRS in general terms (including a glossary suitable for informed non-geneticists) and discuss the use of PRS in psychiatry, including their limitations and cautions for interpretation, as well as their applications now and in the future.
ISSN:2046-1402
2046-1402
DOI:10.12688/f1000research.18491.1