AI Article Synopsis
- Higher educational attainment is generally linked to lower rates of schizophrenia, but recent studies show a surprising positive genetic correlation between the two.
- Researchers analyzed data from genome-wide association studies for both conditions and found significant genetic overlap that contradicts assumptions about their relationship.
- Their findings suggest that specific genes, like FOXO6 and SLITRK1, might influence both educational attainment and schizophrenia, and the schizophrenia diagnoses themselves may consist of at least two distinct subtypes.
Article Abstract
Higher educational attainment (EA) is negatively associated with schizophrenia (SZ). However, recent studies found a positive genetic correlation between EA and SZ. We investigate possible causes of this counterintuitive finding using genome-wide association study results for EA and SZ (N = 443,581) and a replication cohort (1169 controls; 1067 cases) with deeply phenotyped SZ patients. We find strong genetic dependence between EA and SZ that cannot be explained by chance, linkage disequilibrium, or assortative mating. Instead, several genes seem to have pleiotropic effects on EA and SZ, but without a clear pattern of sign concordance. Using EA as a proxy phenotype, we isolate FOXO6 and SLITRK1 as novel candidate genes for SZ. Our results reveal that current SZ diagnoses aggregate over at least two disease subtypes: one part resembles high intelligence and bipolar disorder (BIP), while the other part is a cognitive disorder that is independent of BIP.
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| http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6079028 | PMC |
| http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-05510-z | DOI Listing |
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