With pilot support from DPRC, a team of researchers recently published a paper in Biological Psychiatry titled "Polygenic Liability to Depression Is Associated With Multiple Medical Conditions in the Electronic Health Record: Phenome-wide Association Study of 46,782 Individuals". The results of their work can inform the biological links between depression and both mental and systemic diseases. Although major depressive disorder (MDD) polygenic risk scores cannot currently forecast health outcomes with precision at the individual level, as molecular-genetic discoveries for depression increase, these tools may augment risk prediction for medical and psychiatric conditions.
This study was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health (Grant No. MH101459) and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (Grant No. HD065563 through the Duke Population Research Center).