Penetrance and Pleiotropy of Polygenic Risk Scores for Schizophrenia in 106,160 Patients Across Four Health Care Systems

What is it about?

After first experiencing symptoms, individuals with schizophrenia can often wait months to years for diagnosis and treatment, and typically, the longer the wait, the worse the patient’s symptoms and functioning. However, there are few tools for clinicians to use to identify who is at highest risk. Large-scale studies suggest genetic risk for schizophrenia may be a promising approach, but this has not been tested in hospitals or other clinical settings. Using electronic health records for more than 100,000 U.S. patients, we found that individuals at the highest genetic risk (top 10%) were up to 4.6 times as likely to have schizophrenia than those at the lowest risk (bottom 10%). This provides an initial demonstration of the potential utility of incorporating genetic risk scores in the clinic.

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