Evidence for schizophrenia susceptibility alleles in the Indian population: An association of neurodevelopmental genes in case–control and familial samples.

Schizophrenia is a severe psychiatric disorder with lifetime prevalence of ~ 1% worldwide. A genotyping study was conducted using a custom panel of Illumina 1536 SNPs in 840 schizophrenia cases and 876 controls (351 patients and 385 controls from North India; and 436 patients, 401 controls and 143 familial samples with 53 probands containing 37 complete and 16 incomplete trios from South India). Meta-analysis of this population of Indo-European and Dravidian ancestry identified three strongly associated variants with schizophrenia: STT3A (rs548181, p = 1.47 × 10 − 5 ), NRG1 (rs17603876, p = 8.66 × 10 − 5 ) and GRM7 (rs3864075, p = 4.06 × 10 − 3 ). Finally, a meta-analysis was conducted comparing our data with data from the Schizophrenia Psychiatric Genome-Wide Association Study Consortium (PGC-SCZ) that supported rs548181 ( p = 1.39 × 10 − 7 ). In addition, combined analysis of sporadic case–control association and a transmission disequilibrium test in familial samples from South Indian population identified three associations: rs1062613 ( p = 3.12 × 10 − 3 ), a functional promoter variant of HTR3A ; rs6710782 ( p = 3.50 × 10 − 3 ), an intronic variant of ERBB4 ; and rs891903 ( p = 1.05 × 10 − 2 ), an intronic variant of EBF1 . The results support the risk variants observed in the earlier published work and suggest a potential role of neurodevelopmental genes in the schizophrenia pathogenesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]