Pitt Bioinformatics Study Provides Clues to Relationship between Schizophrenia and Rheumatoid Arthritis

Pitt Bioinformatics Study Provides Clues to Relationship between Schizophrenia and Rheumatoid Arthritis
PITTSBURGH, February 24, 2017 – An in-depth computational analysis of genetic variants implicated in both schizophrenia and rheumatoid arthritis by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh points to eight genes that may explain why susceptibility to one of the disorders could place individuals at lower risk for the other, according to the results of a study published today in the journal npj Schizophrenia. “There is a wealth of genomic data on both schizophrenia and rheumatoid arthritis. Analyzing it jointly with known protein interaction information could provide invaluable clues to the relationship between the diseases and also shed light on their shared roots,” said Madhavi Ganapathiraju Ph.D., associate professor of biomedical informatics at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and senior author of the study. While schizophrenia is a psychiatric disorder of unknown origin and rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune disease of the joints that occurs as a result of the body’s immune system attacking its own cells, both disorders are thought to be influenced by multiple genetic risk factors modified by the environment.“Several previous research studies have hinted at a potential inverse relationship in the prevalence and risk for the two disorders, so we wondered if individual genetic variants may exist that could have opposing effects on the risk of schizophrenia and rheumatoid arthritis,” said co-senior author Vishwajit Nimgaonkar M.D., Ph.D., professor of psychiatry at Pitt’s School of Medicine and human genetics at Pitt’s Graduate School of Public Health.The researchers first analyzed two large databases of genetic variants significantly associated with either schizophrenia or rheumatoid arthritis. They identified 18 unique variants, also known as single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that were located in the HLA region of the genome that harbors genes associated with immune function. The variants appeared to confer different risk for ...

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