HETEROGENEITY AND COMORBIDITY: PERSPECTIVES FROM BIOBANKS, REGISTRIES AND EHRS

Abstract

Large-scale, population-based biobanks, electronic health records (EHRs) and medical registries have been transformative for psychiatric genetics research through providing unprecedented sample sizes. Critically, many of these resources are also providing longitudinal data across an expanding timeline from which the life-course of individual patients can be surveyed. The view is a complex one - varying recurrence, intervals between episodes, treatment experiences, comorbidities, secondary outcomes, and disease trajectories. In short, we observe an immense amount of variability across dataset and individuals. This creates a new opportunity to systematically interrogate if using diverse and nuanced descriptions of individual cases can impact on the genetic findings of underlying architecture of psychiatric disorders. In this symposium, we bring together researchers providing different perspectives and research angles interrogating the complex data from the UKBiobank, iPSYCH, Danish Blood Donors/Copenhagen Hospital Biobank, the Danish Health Registries, Swedish Health Registries, and the BioVu EHR. First, Lu Yi will describe her work using co-sibling analysis in the Swedish Health Registries to describe multiple clinical features of major depression that impact on its genetic architecture. Second, Sarah Guagliardo will dive into the sex-specific heterogeneity in ADHD using Vanderbilt University's BioVu EHR. Third, Jolien Rietkerk will systematically describe variability in polygenic profiles associated with pairwise comorbidity of five major psychiatric disorders using data from the UKBiobank and iPSYCH. Finally, Mischa Lundberg will describe how variations in biobank sampling schema and inclusion/exclusion criteria can impact on the genetic profiles of major depression cases across biobanks, EHRs, and medical registries. Jonathan Flint will discuss this work in the context of ongoing and future directions in psychiatric genetics. This symposium will provide an overview of the complexities and opportunities presented by larger and larger data resources with deeper and broader assessments.