Importance of diverse cohorts
Commenting on the findings, Jennifer Gladys Mulle, MHS, PhD, associate professor of psychiatry at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School at Rutgers University, Piscataway, N.J., noted that while genetic discoveries have led to new therapies in other medical conditions, that has not been the case with schizophrenia.
“In other disorders, having genetic findings have really opened a window into the molecular mechanisms, which has allowed us to develop pharmaceuticals and understand the disease process better,” said Dr. Mulle, who was not part of this study. “But because we haven’t had that in schizophrenia, it’s really held us back. Having genetic variants associated with schizophrenia may really help us understand the mechanism.”
The inclusion of diverse populations is also a key contribution of this study, Dr. Mulle added.
“So far a lot of the work we’ve done in genetics has been on people of European ancestry,” Dr. Mulle said. “The fact that they have found results that are generalizable across multiple ethnicities really suggests that if we develop pharmaceutical agents based on these findings, it will help many people.”
More attention has been paid recently to a growing problem in the study of genetics of psychiatric disorders: More than 95% of participants in genome-wide association studies that seek to identify gene variants linked to disease are of European ancestry.
Dr. Charney and his colleagues had that in mind when they designed the study.
“We can’t get to a place where genetics is clinically useful if we don’t know the extent to which a particular observation that’s found in one population is also true for other populations,” Dr. Charney said.
The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Charney and Dr. Mulle report no relevant financial relationships.
A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.