Pulse Brain · Growing Health Evidence Index
Peer-reviewed

Genome-wide meta-analysis of depression identifies 102 independent variants and highlights the importance of the prefrontal brain regions

David M. Howard, Mark J. Adams, Toni‐Kim Clarke, Jonathan D. Hafferty, Jude Gibson, Masoud Shirali, Jonathan R. I. Coleman, Saskia P. Hagenaars, Joey Ward, Eleanor M. Wigmore, Clara Alloza, Xueyi Shen, Miruna C. Barbu, Eileen Y. Xu, Heather C. Whalley, Riccardo E. Marioni, David J. Porteous, Gail Davies, Ian J. Deary, Gibran Hemani, Klaus Berger, Henning Teismann, Rajesh Rawal, Volker Arolt, Bernhard T. Baune, Udo Dannlowski, Katharina Domschke, Chao Tian, David A. Hinds, Maciej Trzaskowski, Enda M. Byrne, Stephan Ripke, Daniel J. Smıth, Patrick F. Sullivan, Naomi R. Wray, Gerome Breen, Cathryn M. Lewis, Andrew M. McIntosh

Nature Neuroscience · 2019

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Summary

Major depression is a debilitating psychiatric illness that is typically associated with low mood and anhedonia. Depression has a heritable component that has remained difficult to elucidate with current sample sizes due to the polygenic nature of the disorder. To maximize sample size, we meta-analyzed data on 807,553 individuals (246,363 cases and 561,190 controls) from the three largest genome-wide association studies of depression. We identified 102 independent variants, 269 genes, and 15 genesets associated with depression, including both genes and gene pathways associated with synaptic structure and neurotransmission. An enrichment analysis provided further evidence of the importance of prefrontal brain regions. In an independent replication sample of 1,306,354 individuals (414,055 ca

Source type
Peer-reviewed study
DOI
10.1038/s41593-018-0326-7
Catalogue ID
SNmohdw82e-l1mieh
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