Transcriptome-wide association study of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder identifies associated genes and phenotypes

Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a common neurodevelopmental psychiatric disorder. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified several loci associated with ADHD. However, understanding the biological relevance of these genetic loci has proven to be difficult. Here, we conduct an ADHD transcriptome-wide association study (TWAS) consisting of 19,099 cases and 34,194 controls and identify 9 transcriptome-wide significant hits, of which 6 genes were not implicated in the original GWAS. We demonstrate that two of the previous GWAS hits can be largely explained by expression regulation. Probabilistic causal fine-mapping of TWAS signals prioritizes KAT2B with a posterior probability of 0.467 in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and TMEM161B with a posterior probability of 0.838 in the amygdala. Furthermore, pathway enrichment identifies dopaminergic and norepinephrine pathways, which are highly relevant for ADHD. Overall, our findings highlight the power of TWAS to identify and prioritize putatively causal genes. A recent GWAS reported 12 genetic loci for attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Here, Liao et al. perform transcriptomic imputation using these data and 12 brain-relevant tissues from GTEx and CMC to identify 9 genes associated with ADHD by TWAS, 3 of which had not yet been reported for ADHD.