Genetic insights into childhood-onset schizophrenia: The yield of clinical exome sequencing

Childhood-onset schizophrenia (COS) is a rare form of schizophrenia with an onset prior to 13 years of age. Although genetic factors play a role in COS etiology, only a few causal variants have been reported to date. This study presents a diagnostic exome sequencing (ES) in 37 Israeli Jewish families with a proband diagnosed with COS. By implementing a trio/duo ES approach and applying a well-established diagnostic pipeline, we detected clinically significant variants in 7 probands (19 %). These single nucleotide variants and indels were mostly inherited. The implicated genes were ANKRD11, GRIA2, CHD2, CLCN3, CLTC, IGF1R and MICU1. In a secondary analysis that compared COS patients to 4721 healthy controls, we observed that patients had a significant enrichment of rare loss of function (LoF) variants in LoF intolerant genes associated with developmental diseases. Taken together, ES could be considered as a valuable tool in the genetic workup for COS patients.