scholarly journals Genetic Basis of Dual Diagnosis: A Review of Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS) Focusing on Patients with Mood or Anxiety Disorders and Co-Occurring Alcohol-Use Disorder

Diagnostics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
pp. 1055
Author(s):  
Kaloyan Stoychev ◽  
Dancho Dilkov ◽  
Elahe Naghavi ◽  
Zornitsa Kamburova

(1) Background: Comorbidity between Alcohol Use Disorders (AUD), mood, and anxiety disorders represents a significant health burden, yet its neurobiological underpinnings are still elusive. The current paper reviews all genome-wide association studies conducted in the past ten years, sampling those on AUD and mood or anxiety disorders. (2) Methods: In keeping with PRISMA guidelines, we searched EMBASE, Medline/PUBMED, and PsycINFO databases (January 2010 to December 2020), including references of enrolled studies. Study selection was based on predefined criteria and data underwent a multistep revision process. (3) Results: 15 studies were included. Some of them explored dual diagnoses phenotypes directly while others employed correlational analysis based on polygenic risk score approach. Their results support the significant overlap of genetic factors involved in AUDs and mood and anxiety disorders. Comorbidity risk seems to be conveyed by genes engaged in neuronal development, connectivity, and signaling although the precise neuronal pathways and mechanisms remain unclear. (4) Conclusion: given that genes associated with complex traits including comorbid clinical presentations are of small effect, and individually responsible for a very low proportion of total variance, larger samples consisting of multiple refined comorbid combinations confirmed by re-sequencing approaches will be necessary to disentangle the genetic architecture of dual diagnosis.

2021 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dinesh K. Saini ◽  
Yuvraj Chopra ◽  
Jagmohan Singh ◽  
Karansher S. Sandhu ◽  
Anand Kumar ◽  
...  

Author(s):  
Nasa Sinnott-Armstrong ◽  
Sahin Naqvi ◽  
Manuel Rivas ◽  
Jonathan K Pritchard

SummaryGenome-wide association studies (GWAS) have been used to study the genetic basis of a wide variety of complex diseases and other traits. However, for most traits it remains difficult to interpret what genes and biological processes are impacted by the top hits. Here, as a contrast, we describe UK Biobank GWAS results for three molecular traits—urate, IGF-1, and testosterone—that are biologically simpler than most diseases, and for which we know a great deal in advance about the core genes and pathways. Unlike most GWAS of complex traits, for all three traits we find that most top hits are readily interpretable. We observe huge enrichment of significant signals near genes involved in the relevant biosynthesis, transport, or signaling pathways. We show how GWAS data illuminate the biology of variation in each trait, including insights into differences in testosterone regulation between females and males. Meanwhile, in other respects the results are reminiscent of GWAS for more-complex traits. In particular, even these molecular traits are highly polygenic, with most of the variance coming not from core genes, but from thousands to tens of thousands of variants spread across most of the genome. Given that diseases are often impacted by many distinct biological processes, including these three, our results help to illustrate why so many variants can affect risk for any given disease.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan A. Freudenthal ◽  
Markus J. Ankenbrand ◽  
Dominik G. Grimm ◽  
Arthur Korte

AbstractMotivationGenome-wide association studies (GWAS) are one of the most commonly used methods to detect associations between complex traits and genomic polymorphisms. As both genotyping and phenotyping of large populations has become easier, typical modern GWAS have to cope with massive amounts of data. Thus, the computational demand for these analyses grew remarkably during the last decades. This is especially true, if one wants to implement permutation-based significance thresholds, instead of using the naïve Bonferroni threshold. Permutation-based methods have the advantage to provide an adjusted multiple hypothesis correction threshold that takes the underlying phenotypic distribution into account and will thus remove the need to find the correct transformation for non Gaussian phenotypes. To enable efficient analyses of large datasets and the possibility to compute permutation-based significance thresholds, we used the machine learning framework TensorFlow to develop a linear mixed model (GWAS-Flow) that can make use of the available CPU or GPU infrastructure to decrease the time of the analyses especially for large datasets.ResultsWe were able to show that our application GWAS-Flow outperforms custom GWAS scripts in terms of speed without loosing accuracy. Apart from p-values, GWAS-Flow also computes summary statistics, such as the effect size and its standard error for each individual marker. The CPU-based version is the default choice for small data, while the GPU-based version of GWAS-Flow is especially suited for the analyses of big data.AvailabilityGWAS-Flow is freely available on GitHub (https://github.com/Joyvalley/GWAS_Flow) and is released under the terms of the MIT-License.


Genome ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 53 (11) ◽  
pp. 876-883 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Hayes ◽  
Mike Goddard

Results from genome-wide association studies in livestock, and humans, has lead to the conclusion that the effect of individual quantitative trait loci (QTL) on complex traits, such as yield, are likely to be small; therefore, a large number of QTL are necessary to explain genetic variation in these traits. Given this genetic architecture, gains from marker-assisted selection (MAS) programs using only a small number of DNA markers to trace a limited number of QTL is likely to be small. This has lead to the development of alternative technology for using the available dense single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) information, called genomic selection. Genomic selection uses a genome-wide panel of dense markers so that all QTL are likely to be in linkage disequilibrium with at least one SNP. The genomic breeding values are predicted to be the sum of the effect of these SNPs across the entire genome. In dairy cattle breeding, the accuracy of genomic estimated breeding values (GEBV) that can be achieved and the fact that these are available early in life have lead to rapid adoption of the technology. Here, we discuss the design of experiments necessary to achieve accurate prediction of GEBV in future generations in terms of the number of markers necessary and the size of the reference population where marker effects are estimated. We also present a simple method for implementing genomic selection using a genomic relationship matrix. Future challenges discussed include using whole genome sequence data to improve the accuracy of genomic selection and management of inbreeding through genomic relationships.


2008 ◽  
Vol 9 (5) ◽  
pp. 356-369 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark I. McCarthy ◽  
Gonçalo R. Abecasis ◽  
Lon R. Cardon ◽  
David B. Goldstein ◽  
Julian Little ◽  
...  

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