Overlapping Genetic Architecture Between Schizophrenia and Neurodegenerative Disorders

Abstract

Epidemiological and clinical studies have suggested comorbidity between schizophrenia and several neurodegenerative disorders. However, little is known whether there exists shared genetic architecture. To explore their relationship from a genetic and transcriptomic perspective, we applied polygenic and linkage disequilibrium-informed methods to examine the genetic correlation between schizophrenia and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal dementia. We further combined genome-wide association summary statistics with large-scale transcriptomic datasets, to identify putative shared genes and explore related pathological tissues. We identified positive and significant correlation between schizophrenia and ALS at genetic (correlation 0.22; 95% CI: 0.16–0.28; p = 4.00E-04) and transcriptomic (correlation 0.08; 95% CI: 0.04–0.11; p = 0.034) levels. We further demonstrated that schizophrenia- and ALS-inferred gene expression overlap significantly in four tissues including skin, small intestine, brain cortex and lung, and highlighted three genes, namely GLB1L3, ZNHIT3 and TMEM194A as potential mediators of the correlation between schizophrenia and ALS. Our findings revealed overlapped gene expression profiles in specific tissues between schizophrenia and ALS, and identified novel potential shared genes. These results provided a better understanding for the pleiotropy of schizophrenia, and paved way for future studies to further elucidate the molecular drivers of schizophrenia.