No  association   between   schizophrenia  susceptibility  variants  and  macroscopic  structural  brain  volume  variation  in  healthy subjects. Am J Med Genet B Neuropsychiatr Genet, 2016, 171(2): 160-8

Title: No association between schizophrenia susceptibility variants and macroscopic structural brain volume variation in healthy subject-s. 

Author: Li M, Huang L, Wang J, Su B, Luo XJ  

Publication Name: Am J Med Genet B Neuropsychiatr Genet 

Pub Year:2016

Volume: 171  

Issue: 2 

Page Number: 160-8

IF: 3.391

Abstract:

Previous studies have suggested that genetic variants for schizophrenia susceptibility might contribute to structural brain volumevariations in schizophrenia patients, including total brain volume, hippocampal volume, and amygdalar volume. However, whether these schizophrenia susceptibility variants are associated with macroscopic structural brain volume (i.e., intracranial volume, totalbrain volume, and hippocampal volume) in healthy subjects is still unclear. In this study, we investigated the associations between 47schizophrenia susceptibility variants (from 25 well-characterized schizophrenia susceptibility genes) and cranial volume variation in ahealthy Chinese sample (N = 1,013). We also extracted the association between these 47 schizophrenia risk variants and themacroscopic structural brain volume (intracranial volume, total brain volume and hippocampal volume) in a large healthy sample of European ancestry (ENIGMA sample, N = 5,775). We identified several single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) nominally associated with intracranial volume, total brain volume, and hippocampal volume at P < 0.05 (uncorrected). However, after Bonferroni corrections for multiple testing, no SNP showed significant association. Hence, our results do not support previous observations that schizophreniasusceptibility variants are associated with brain structure (e.g., hippocampal volume) in healthy individuals, and indicate that singleschizophrenia risk variant may not contribute significantly to macroscopic brain structure (e.g., intracranial volume or hippocampalvolume) variation in healthy subjects.