Taking this observation further, Daly and colleagues pointed out that the results are consistent with a polygenic model in which spontaneous coding mutations increase risk between 5 and 20 fold [5•]. This finding is important because it demonstrates how the genetic architecture of psychiatric disease consists of a continuum. As Visscher argues, the dichotomy of rare variant of large effect versus common variant of small effect is specious, since the frequency and effect size of the alleles that increase susceptibility range across a continuum [8•].
