A
new PTSD GWAS makes a few bold claims. I think it's a good example of the kind of hype that these studies, which show next to nothing, crank out to hype their results.
In this puff piece related to the study, they start with:
Large study reveals PTSD has strong genetic component like other psychiatric disorders
Which 1. It does not and 2. Is not really shown to be true of other psychiatric disorders, either, except in the same hyped fashion as this study. Now let's look at this from the same puff piece:
The study team also reports that, like other psychiatric disorders and many other human traits, PTSD is highly polygenic, meaning it is associated with thousands of genetic variants throughout the genome, each making a small contribution to the disorder. Six genomic regions called loci harbor variants that were strongly associated with disease risk, providing some clues about the biological pathways involved in PTSD.
If it is highly polygenic, on what basis are they saying this if only 6 loci were strongly associated with disease risk (this is not even accurate, as I'll discuss in moment)? "
Genome-wide, a substantial number of variants had some level of association with PTSD, showing the disorder to be highly polygenic," What this is saying is that there are other loci (presumed genetic variants) that did not reach significance, but they include through the subterfuge of "polygenic scores." There is no basis, other than the hopefulness of those doing these studies, that these below significant findings are anything more than non-significant findings. I'll also note that none of these 6 loci were found in previous studies. Thus, this is an entirely unreplicated study. Now, let's take a look at the loci they did claim to find:
