The Genetic Epidemiology of Psychosis
Department of Genetic Epidemiology
The symptoms of severe mental disorders range from listlessness and difficulties concentrating to hallucination and delusion. Cognitive and motor disorders may also occur. The longitudinal multicentre PsyCourse study at the LMU in Munich includes patients from the affective to psychotic spectrum (mainly depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia). Extensive data (including demographic information, diagnoses, neuropsychological tests and more) and biomaterial were collected at four time points over the course of 18 months.
In PsyCourse, we are involved in studying the longitudinal course of various endpoints / phenotypes, e.g. executive (cognitive) functions, which play a central role in the regulation of thoughts and actions in daily life. For example, genome-wide significant markers for the longitudinal course of executive functions were identified and replicated in a genome-wide association study (GWAS). For a pathway analysis based on this that looks at the connection between biological pathways and the longitudinal course, a corresponding methodology and the R packagekalpra were developed. The package can be downloaded freely from the GWDG gitlab repository via the link provided.
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