Assessment and ascertainment in psychiatric molecular genetics: challenges and opportunities for cross-disorder research

Abstract

Psychiatric disorders are highly comorbid, heritable, and genetically correlated [1,2,3,4]. The primary objective of cross-disorder psychiatric genetics research is to identify and characterize both the shared genetic factors that contribute to convergent disease etiologies and the unique genetic factors that distinguish between disorders [4, 5]. This information can illuminate the biological mechanisms underlying comorbid presentations of psychopathology, improve nosology and prediction of illness risk and trajectories, and aid the development of more effective and targeted interventions. In this review we discuss how estimates of comorbidity and identification of shared genetic loci between disorders can be influenced by how disorders are measured (phenotypic assessment) and the inclusion or exclusion criteria in individual genetic studies (sample ascertainment). Specifically, the depth of measurement, source of diagnosis, and time frame of disease trajectory have major implications for the clinical validity of the assessed phenotypes. Further, biases introduced in the ascertainment of both cases and controls can inflate or reduce estimates of genetic correlations. The impact of these design choices may have important implications for large meta-analyses of cohorts from diverse populations that use different forms of assessment and inclusion criteria, and subsequent cross-disorder analyses thereof. We review how assessment and ascertainment affect genetic findings in both univariate and multivariate analyses and conclude with recommendations for addressing them in future research.