Cross-Disorder Psychiatric Genomics.

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: The following review provides some description of the movement in cross-disorder psychiatric genomics toward addressing both comorbidity and polygenicity.

RECENT FINDINGS: We attempt to show how dimensional approaches to the phenotype have led to further addressing the problem of comorbidity of psychiatric diagnoses. And we also attempt to show how a dimensional approach to the genome, with different statistical methods from traditional genome-wide association analyses, has begun to resolve the problem of massive polygenicity.

SUMMARY: Cross-disorder research, of any area in psychiatry, arguably has the most potential to inform clinical diagnosis, early detection and prevention strategies, and pharmacological treatment research. Future research might leverage what we now know to inform developmental studies of risk and resilience.