Shared polygenic contribution between childhood attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and adult schizophrenia

BACKGROUND: There is recent evidence of some degree of shared genetic susceptibility between adult schizophrenia and childhood attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) for rare chromosomal variants.

AIMS: To determine whether there is overlap between common alleles conferring risk of schizophrenia in adults with those that do so for ADHD in children.

METHOD: We used recently published Psychiatric Genome-wide Association Study (GWAS) Consortium (PGC) adult schizophrenia data to define alleles over-represented in people with schizophrenia and tested whether those alleles were more common in 727 children with ADHD than in 2067 controls.

RESULTS: Schizophrenia risk alleles discriminated ADHD cases from controls (P = 1.04 × 10(-4), R(2) = 0.45%); stronger discrimination was given by alleles that were risk alleles for both adult schizophrenia and adult bipolar disorder (also derived from a PGC data-set) (P = 9.98 × 10(-6), R(2) = 0.59%).

CONCLUSIONS: This increasing evidence for a small, but significant, shared genetic susceptibility between adult schizophrenia and childhood ADHD highlights the importance of research work across traditional diagnostic boundaries.