Editorial: Translational genetics of child psychopathology: a distant dream?

For decades now twin, family and adoption studies have pointed to a substantial role for genetic factors in risk for psychiatric disorder. Behaviour genetic studies are not, of course, designed to tell us about the 'genetic architecture' of disorders - the number of risk variants involved, their frequency, or their effects sizes - but their findings clearly suggest that given the high levels of heritability detected, identifying the gene variants involved could provide important pointers to aetiology, and might well have implications for treatment. In and of themselves heritability findings have little practical value as a basis for a translational genetics of psychiatric disorders. They cannot help us identify pathophysiological pathways that need to be targeted through therapeutic innovation or inform the sort of tailoring of treatments to individual biological 'types' to promote personalized medicine. To do these things we need to move from estimating heritability to identifying specific genetic markers implicating specific neuro-biological systems.