Genetic Variants Tied to Sex Differences in Psychiatric Disorders

Recommendable! Research at an incredible scale!

"... The study, published March 22 in Biological Psychiatry, is the largest genome-wide association study (GWAS) to date—including contributions from more than 100 researchers—to look at the underlying genetic differences between the sexes for insight into why bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and depression affect men and women differently and at different rates. ...
The current research combines data from two international consortia, the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (PGC) and iPSYCH, both of which aim to tease apart the genetic and environmental factors that affect mental health. Together, the two collections represent a pool of almost 200,000 patients of European ancestry, roughly half of whom have been diagnosed with one of the three disorders. ...
And what was even more exciting was that the pathways that were implicated—vascular pathways and immune pathways—fit with what has been found and mapped by the neurobiology. We study the shared pathophysiology between the brain and the heart, but it turns out that schizophrenia also has a very high comorbidity with cardiovascular disease. I was thrilled to see we actually found these genes with shared sex differences in areas that we’ve been studying."

Genetic Variants Tied to Sex Differences in Psychiatric Disorders | The Scientist Magazine® The largest study of its kind identifies single nucleotide polymorphisms with disparate effects on men’s and women’s susceptibility to conditions such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.

Here is the link to the underlying research paper:

Sex-Dependent Shared and Non-Shared Genetic Architecture, Across Mood and Psychotic Disorders (no public access)