Comparative genetic architectures of schizophrenia in East Asian and European populations

As we all know, schizophrenia is a debilitating psychiatric disorder with prevalence of about ~1% lifetime risk across different populations. However, previously literatures mainly reported in European populations and the results remained ungeneralizable. The present study has explored the biological insights of schizophrenia in the largest sample size of East Asian populations up to now.

To ensure compliance with the Interim Measures for Management of Human Genetic Resources, the individual-level genetic data for samples recruited from mainland China have been stored and kept on a server physically located in China. Analyses on these samples are performed by Chinese researchers using the PGC codes/pipelines/QC standards as those used for other samples.

Interestingly, the findings of this study indicated very meaningful implications for us to explain the mechanism of schizophrenia, especially for trans-ethnicity fine-mapping, and the polygenic risk scores (PRS).

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A fixed-effect of meta-analysis including individuals from East Asian and European ancestries identified 208 significant associated signals in 176 genetic loci (53 novel loci). Moreover, the trans-ancestry fine-mapping reduced the sets of candidate causal variants in 44 loci. Furthermore, the polygenic risk scores (PRS) had reduced performance when transferred across ancestries, which may ensure the generalizability across populations.