Genetic Method Assigns Probability Scores Across Four Psychiatric Diagnoses
A team from the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium developed DDx-PRS, a technique that estimates the likelihood an individual has schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, or none of those conditions. The method produces calibrated probabilities for each category by modeling how genetic risk scores vary and covary across the disorders. Testing involved 1,048,683 total samples, with 41,917 to 173,140 cases per disorder, and results appeared in Nature Genetics. In held-out test data of 11,460 samples split evenly across the four categories, true diagnosis probabilities in the top deciles of predicted probabilities were considerably larger than baseline rates.
The technique could one day help doctors separate overlapping psychiatric conditions using genetic data, though it needs more validation before clinical use.
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