Strong genetic correlation between mental disorders

: In clinical practice, psychiatric patients often receive two or even more diagnoses. Also, psychiatric diagnoses commonly change over time. Biomarkers to facilitate a differential diagnosis would be helpful, but the search to find such help has largely been in vain. The situation is different in neurology, since diagnoses do not commonly change and comorbidity is not the rule. Furthermore, in this field biomarkers for a differential diagnosis are readily available. The results from the recent genome-wide analysis by the BrainSTORM consortium published in Science (2018) have shed light on this inequality by showing that mental, but not neurological, disorders have largely overlapping genetic backgrounds. This finding suggests that the substrates of mental disorders, or at least their vulnerabilities, are to a large extent similar. The search for biomarkers in psychiatry should therefore continue in a generalised way, i.e. we should investigate common vulnerabilities for mental disorders in order to provide early supportive and protective measures to prevent any type of mental illness.