PAR-20-027: Genetic Architecture of Mental Disorders in Ancestrally Diverse Populations (Collaborative U01 Clinical Trial Not Allowed) - 0 views
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MiamiOH OARS on 08 Oct 19Epidemiological studies have shown that psychiatric disorders, constitute a significant public health burden across diverse populations worldwide. These mental disorders are characterized by marked genetic heterogeneity, with both common and rare variation contributing to the complex phenotypic outcomes. For reasons such as population homogeneity and ease of ascertainment, most genome-wide genetic studies to date have mainly focused on cohorts of European-ancestry, however, no single population is sufficient to fully uncover the variants underlying neuropsychiatric diseases in all populations. The absence of diverse ancestries in genome-wide association studies has therefore negatively impacted their ability to illuminate the full genetic architecture of complex neuropsychiatric traits. Populations with different ancestral origins vary in terms of allele frequencies, biological adaptations, and other properties that affect the detectability and importance of risk variants. Lack of ancestrally diverse genome-wide data can lead to the misidentification of causal variants due to cryptic population stratification or simply overlooking a causal variant altogether, since rare variants are likely to be more recent in origin and more geographically localized.