How can big data transform our understanding of mental illness - with biological and clinical impact?
Abstract: Mental disorders and related traits are heritable and polygenic, and there is widespread shared genetic risk, mirroring their overlapping clinical characteristics. Recent results have increased ourunderstanding of the polygenic architecture of complex mental traits, indicating a prominence of pleiotropic genetic effects across higher-order domains of mental function. Further, the extensive genetic overlap across mental disorders and related traits, includes mixed effect directions and few disorder-specific variants. Thus, it is possible that genetic susceptibility for mental disorders is differentiated by divergent effect distributions of pleiotropic genetic variants rather than disorder-specific variants. The landscape of shared genetic architecture across mental disorders, may inform genetic discovery and biological characterization, but also have impact on psychiatric nosology, as well as prediction and potentially treatment stratification