Preben Bo Mortensen

TL;DR: Neonatal antibodies to infectious agents and risk of bipolar disorder: a population‐based case–control study.

Abstract: Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a highly heritable and heterogeneous group of neurodevelopmental phenotypes diagnosed in more than 1% of children. Common genetic variants contribute substantially to ASD susceptibility, but to date no individual variants have been robustly associated with ASD. With a marked sample size increase from a unique Danish population resource, we report a genome-wide association meta-analysis of 18,381 ASD cases and 27,969 controls that identifies five genome-wide significant loci. Leveraging GWAS results from three phenotypes with significantly overlapping genetic architectures (schizophrenia, major depression, and educational attainment), seven additional loci shared with other traits are identified at equally strict significance levels. Dissecting the polygenic architecture we find both quantitative and qualitative polygenic heterogeneity across ASD subtypes, in contrast to what is typically seen in other complex disorders. These results highlight biological insights, particularly relating to neuronal function and corticogenesis and establish that GWAS performed at scale will be much more productive in the near term in ASD, just as it has been in a broad range of important psychiatric and diverse medical phenotypes.

TL;DR: An expanded set of variants in the major histocompatibility complex region, near neurogranin (NRGN) and in an intron of transcription factor 4 (TCF4), and two novel variants showing genome-wide significant association are found.

TL;DR: Maternal AD was associated with a 29% increased incidence rate of TS in male offspring, and this finding supports the hypothesis that neuroimmunological disorders may act as a component in the etiology of a subset of TS.