Exploring contributors to variability in estimates of SNP-heritability and genetic correlations from the iPSYCH case-cohort and published meta-studies of major psychiatric disorders.

Abstract

As more and more large psychiatric genetic cohorts are becoming available, more and more independent investigations into the underlying genetic architecture are performed, and an expanding set of replicates for estimates of key genetic parameters, namely, liability scale SNP heritability and genetic correlations - is amassing in the literature. In recent work, we published a set of SNP-heritability and genetic correlation estimates for major psychiatric disorders using data from the iPSYCH case-cohort study, and presented them alongside estimates gleaned from large, independently collected, analyzed and published meta-studies of the same disorders. Although in the broadest sense the estimates from iPSYCH and external meta-studies were concordant, and requiring strict statistical significance could reject the null hypothesis for few pairs, there were enough subtle trends in the differences to warrant further investigation. In this work, we consider a set of factors related to sample ascertainment, including the lifetime risks for disorders for the sampled populations, the use of age censored or partially screened controls, the sampling of extreme cases and controls, and diagnostic error rates, and attempt to assess their potential contributions to estimates of genetic parameters in the context of the difference trends observed in our previous work.