Applying polygenic risk scores to postpartum depression (original) (raw)

2014, Archives of Women's Mental Health

The etiology of major depressive disorder (MDD) is likely to be heterogeneous, but postpartum depression (PPD) is hypothesized to represent a more homogenous subset of MDD. We use genome-wide SNP data to explore this hypothesis. We assembled a total cohort of 1,420 self-report cases of PPD and 9,473 controls with genome-wide genotypes from Australia, The Netherlands, Sweden and the UK. We estimated the total variance attributable to genotyped variants. We used association results from the Psychiatric Genomics Consortia (PGC) of bipolar disorder (BPD) and MDD to create polygenic scores in PPD and related MDD data sets to estimate the genetic overlap between the disorders. We estimated that the percentage of variance on the liability scale explained by common genetic variants to be 0.22 with a standard error of 0.12, p=0.02. The proportion of variance (R 2) from a logistic regression of PPD case/control status in all Psychiatric Genomic Consortium Major Depressive Disorder Working Group is listed in the Supplementary Material Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article