Wouter Peyrot is a statistical and psychiatric geneticist at the Amsterdam UMC in the Netherlands. He is also trained as a psychiatrist and works two days a week at the acute psychiatric outpatient service. 

Towards clinical implementation of genetic risk profiles using DDx-PRS

Two of the main challenges for clinical implementation of genetic prediction in psychiatry are the following. First, great progress on genetic methods for case-control polygenic prediction has been made. However, the clinical question rarely is to assess the risk of one disorder (e.g. schizophrenia (SCZ)) versus healthy controls, but rather to assess the risk of multiple disorders compared to each other (e.g. SCZ vs. bipolar disorder (BIP) vs. depression (MDD)) and controls. Second, for clinical implementation genetic predictions need to be well-calibrated to facilitate interpretation in terms of absolute disorder risk. We developed a new method, DDx-PRS, to compute the risk for SCZ, BIP and MDD simultaneously, yielding well-calibrated risk predictions (e.g. SCZ=50%,BIP=25%,MDD=15%,control=10%). In this talk, I will present DDx-PRS and discuss potential ways forwards for clinical implementation in the future.