Common susceptibility variants are shared between schizophrenia and psoriasis in the Han Chinese population
Xianyong Yin1, Nathan E Wineinger1, Kai Wang1
1From the Institute of Dermatology, Department of Dermatology of The First Affiliated Hospital. Key lab of Dermatology Ministry of Education, Anhui Medical University, Hefei, China (Yin, Jiang, Wu, Cui, Shen, Cheng, Zhou, Chen, Zuo, Zhend, Fan, Wang, Sun, Yang, Zhang); the Institute of Dermatology, Huashan Hospital, Fudan University, Shanghai, China (Yin, Zhang, Huang, Xu, Zhang); the The Scripps Translational Science Institute, La Jolla, California, USA (Yin, Wineinger, Schork); the Department of Molecular and Experimental Medicine, The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, USA (Yin, Schork); Human Biology, J. Craig Venter Institute, La Jolla, California, USA (Yin, Schork); the Department of Genetics, and Renaissance Computing Institute, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, USA (Yin); the Scripps Health, La Jolla, California, USA (Wineinger); the Department of Neurology, the First Affiliated Hospital of Anhui Medical University, Hefei, China (Wang); the Peking University Sixth Hospital, Peking University Institute of Mental Health; Key Laboratory of Mental Health, Ministry of Health (Peking University), Beijing, China (Yue, Wang); the Peking University Sixth Hospital, Peking University Institute of Mental Health; Key Laboratory of Mental Health, Ministry of Health (Peking University), Beijing, China (Yue, Wang); the Human Genetics, Genome Institute of Singapore, Singapore (Norgren, Wang, Liu); the Institute of Mental Health, Singapore (Norgren, Wang, Liu); the Institute of Mental Health, Singapore (Lee); the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, National University of Singapore, Singapore 138672, Singapore (Tai, Liu).
Background:
Previous studies have shown that individuals with schizophrenia have a greater risk for psoriasis than a typical person. This suggests that there might be a shared genetic etiology between the 2 conditions. We aimed to characterize the potential shared genetic susceptibility between schizophrenia and psoriasis using genome-wide marker genotype data.
Methods:
We obtained genetic data on individuals with psoriasis, schizophrenia and control individuals. We applied a marker-based coheritability estimation procedure, polygenic score analysis, a gene set enrichment test and a least absolute shrinkage and selection operator regression model to estimate the potential shared genetic etiology between the 2 diseases. We validated the results in independent schizophrenia and psoriasis cohorts from Singapore.
Results:
We included 1139 individuals with psoriasis, 744 with schizophrenia and 1678 controls in our analysis, and we validated the results in independent cohorts, including 441 individuals with psoriasis (and 2420 controls) and 1630 with schizophrenia (and 1860 controls). We estimated that a large fraction of schizophrenia and psoriasis risk could be attributed to common variants (h2SNP = 29% ± 5.0%, p = 2.00 × 10-8), with a coheritability estimate between the traits of 21%. We identified 5 variants within the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) gene region, which were most likely to be associated with both diseases and collectively conferred a significant risk effect (odds ratio of highest risk quartile = 6.03, p < 2.00 × 10-16). We discovered that variants contributing most to the shared heritable component between psoriasis and schizophrenia were enriched in antigen processing and cell endoplasmic reticulum.
Limitations:
Our sample size was relatively small. The findings of 5 HLA gene variants were complicated by the complex structure in the HLA region.
Conclusion:
We found evidence for a shared genetic etiology between schizophrenia and psoriasis. The mechanism for this shared genetic basis likely involves immune and calcium signalling pathways.
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