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Background\ud Individuals with a mental health disorder appear to be at increased risk of medical illness.\ud Aims\ud To examine rates of medical illnesses in patients with bipolar disorder (n = 1720) and to examine the clinical course of the bipolar illness according to lifetime medical illness burden.\ud Method\ud Participants recruited within the UK were asked about the lifetime occurrence of 20 medical illnesses, interviewed using the Schedules for Clinical Assessment in Neuropsychiatry (SCAN) and diagnosed according to DSM-IV criteria.\ud Results\ud We found significantly increased rates of several medical illnesses in our bipolar sample. A high medical illness burden was associated with a history of anxiety disorder, rapid cycling mood episodes, suicide attempts and mood episodes with a typically acute onset.\ud \ud Conclusions\ud \ud Bipolar disorder is associated with high rates of medical illness. This comorbidity needs to be taken into account by services in order to improve outcomes for patients with bipolar disorder and also in research investigating the aetiology of affective disorder where shared biological pathways may play a role.

With the recent success of genome-wide association studies (GWAS), a wealth of association data has been accomplished for more than 200 complex diseases/traits, proposing a strong demand for data integration and interpretation. A combinatory analysis of multiple GWAS datasets, or an integrative analysis of GWAS data and other high-throughput data, has been particularly promising. In this study, we proposed an integrative analysis framework of multiple GWAS datasets by overlaying association signals onto the protein-protein interaction network, and demonstrated it using schizophrenia datasets. Building on a dense module search algorithm, we first searched for significantly enriched subnetworks for schizophrenia in each single GWAS dataset and then implemented a discovery-evaluation strategy to identify module genes with consistent association signals. We validated the module genes in an independent dataset, and also examined them through meta-analysis of the related SNPs using multiple GWAS datasets. As a result, we identified 205 module genes with a joint effect significantly associated with schizophrenia; these module genes included a number of well-studied candidate genes such as DISC1, GNA12, GNA13, GNAI1, GPR17, and GRIN2B. Further functional analysis suggested these genes are involved in neuronal related processes. Additionally, meta-analysis found that 18 SNPs in 9 module genes had P meta, Author Summary The recent success of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) has generated a wealth of genotyping data critical to studies of genetic architectures of many complex diseases. In contrast to traditional single marker analysis, an integrative analysis of multiple genes and the assessment of their joint effects have been particularly promising, especially upon the availability of many GWAS datasets and other high-throughput datasets for numerous complex diseases. In this study, we developed an integrative analysis framework for multiple GWAS datasets and demonstrated it in schizophrenia. We first constructed a GWAS-weighted protein-protein interaction (PPI) network and then applied a dense module search algorithm to identify subnetworks with combinatory disease effects. We applied combinatorial criteria for module selection based on permutation tests to determine whether the modules are significantly different from random gene sets and whether the modules are associated with the disease in investigation. Importantly, considering there are many complex diseases with multiple GWAS datasets available, we proposed a discovery-evaluation strategy to search for modules with consistent combined effects from two or more GWAS datasets. This approach can be applied to any diseases or traits that have two or more GWAS datasets available.

There are many instances in genetics in which we wish to determine whether two candidate populations are distinguishable on the basis of their genetic structure. Examples include populations which are geographically separated, case--control studies and quality control (when participants in a study have been genotyped at different laboratories). This latter application is of particular importance in the era of large scale genome wide association studies, when collections of individuals genotyped at different locations are being merged to provide increased power. The traditional method for detecting structure within a population is some form of exploratory technique such as principal components analysis. Such methods, which do not utilise our prior knowledge of the membership of the candidate populations. are termed \emph{unsupervised}. Supervised methods, on the other hand are able to utilise this prior knowledge when it is available. In this paper we demonstrate that in such cases modern supervised approaches are a more appropriate tool for detecting genetic differences between populations. We apply two such methods, (neural networks and support vector machines) to the classification of three populations (two from Scotland and one from Bulgaria). The sensitivity exhibited by both these methods is considerably higher than that attained by principal components analysis and in fact comfortably exceeds a recently conjectured theoretical limit on the sensitivity of unsupervised methods. In particular, our methods can distinguish between the two Scottish populations, where principal components analysis cannot. We suggest, on the basis of our results that a supervised learning approach should be the method of choice when classifying individuals into pre-defined populations, particularly in quality control for large scale genome wide association studies., Comment: Accepted PLOS One