Abstract

Genomics Approaches Bridging Neuroscience and Psychiatry

Author(s): Mark Torres

The clinical and research communities have shown an interest in the possibility of establishing a metric for the individual's genetic risk for a particular disease or trait. As a result, numerous organizations have developed and validated genomic profiling methods with the intention of using them in clinical care. Combining estimates from genome-wide association studies into polygenic risk scores, which broadly represent an individual's number of inherited risk alleles, is currently used to calculate genetic risk for particular psychiatric conditions. Functional molecular phenotypes that are closer to genetic variation and are less penalized by the multiple testing that is required in genome-wide association studies have started to be considered in novel alternative approaches for the calculation of polygenic risk scores. In contrast, the traditional method for calculating polygenic risk scores aggregates estimates of gene-disease associations.