The same thesis was not supported for neurological disorders, which, according to the researchers, are more individual.
An international team of scientists has conducted a large-scale study of genes and phenotypes to determine if there are patterns in the development of psychiatric and neurological diseases. Their work is published in the journal Science.
Geneticists used data from studies on genome-wide search for associations. The purpose of these studies is to search for associations between genomic variants and phenotypic traits. They studied data from 265,218 patients with one of 25 cognitive impairments. Ten disorders were of a psychiatric nature and 15 were neurological. In addition, they looked at 784,643 undiagnosed individuals as a control group. All this information was assessed in comparison with 17 phenotypes of 1,191,588 individuals.
Analysis of this data set showed that many psychiatric disorders have the same genome regions. For example, schizophrenia has been shown to be genetically correlated with most psychiatric illnesses such as obsessive-compulsive disorder or bipolar disorder. At the same time, neurological diseases did not show this connection. Researchers believe they have individual genetic backgrounds.
Correlation between cognitive impairment and phenotypes / Science.
At the same time, scientists have found an interesting link between high cognitive abilities in childhood and the risk of developing diseases in the future. This applied to both psychiatric and neurological ailments.
Alexey Evglevsky
