“Identification of 15 Genetic Loci Associated With Risk of Major Depression in Individuals of European Descent”, Craig L. Hyde, Michael W. Nagle, Chao Tian, Xing Chen, Sara A. Paciga, Jens R. Wendland, Joyce Y. Tung, David A. Hinds, Roy H. Perlis, Ashley R. Winslow2016-08-01 (, ; backlinks; similar)⁠:

Despite strong evidence supporting the heritability of major depressive disorder (MDD), previous genome-wide studies were unable to identify risk loci among individuals of European descent.

We used self-report data from 75,607 individuals reporting clinical diagnosis of depression and 231,747 individuals reporting no history of depression through 23andMe and carried out meta-analysis of these results with published MDD genome-wide association study results.

We identified 5 independent variants from 4 regions associated with self-report of clinical diagnosis or treatment for depression. Loci with a p value <1.0 × 10−5 in the meta-analysis were further analyzed in a replication data set (45,773 cases and 106,354 controls) from 23andMe. A total of 17 independent SNPs from 15 regions reached genome-wide statistical-significance after joint analysis over all 3 data sets.

Some of these loci were also implicated in genome-wide association studies of related psychiatric traits.

These studies provide evidence for large-scale consumer genomic data as a powerful and efficient complement to data collected from traditional means of ascertainment for neuropsychiatric disease genomics.