PTSD and the GWAS Hype Machine

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:

You can break them up into 3 groups:
2 were found in white European ancestry
1 was found in African Ancestry
"Analyses stratified by sex implicate 3 additional loci in men."

As you can see, there is already a problem, here. All the 6 loci were found by stratifying the dataset. The implication is that different groups have some different collections of SNP's that confer PTSD. Here's another possible implication: This is all population stratification. For example, most of the males in the study, as I understand it, are veterans. While veterans are a diverse group on the whole, they are collectively more likely to be from similar socioeconomic backgrounds and, thus, more likely to have some genetic commonalities (unrelated to PTSD). When you break up the dataset by race or sex, you find a few loci. This is consistent with false positives, generated by a bit of pop/strat. Here is their conclusion related to that:

These results demonstrate the role of genetic variation in the biology of risk for PTSD and highlight the necessity of conducting sex-stratified analyses and expanding GWAS beyond European ancestry populations.

I think it demonstrates something entirely different, which is that all of this is just false positives and not only will not replicate between one study and the next, but will never replicate in diverse datasets that water down the pop/strat.
Let's consider the implications of what they are proposing, here: There is a large collection of SNP's for which, if a person has more than the average number, will make them have long-standing symptoms if they are the victims of violence. How such a thing would happen, is left unsaid. Moreover, only a very few of these loci are significantly higher than in the general population, and even then only when the data is stratified by race or sex.