The risk of getting a psychiatric illness is largely heritable — and many of the genetic variants involved seem to be shared across disorders.
The international Cross-Disorder Group of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium identified common genetic variants in more than 30,000 patients diagnosed with one of five psychiatric disorders, and compared these with thousands of non-diagnosed controls.
These variants accounted for 17–29% of risk for the illnesses, and there is substantial overlap between disorders. For example, in schizophrenia, 15% of the variants overlapped with bipolar disorder, 9% with depression and 3% with autism.
Nature Genet. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ng.2711 (2013)
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Common variants behind disorders. Nature 500, 381 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/500381c
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/500381c