Schizophrenia is a common psychiatric disorder with significant sex differences in prevalence, age of onset and morbidity68. For example, most cases occur between the ages of 16 and 25 years in men and between the ages of 25 and 30 years among women. Overall, the male to female sex ratio is 1.412,69. Estimates of heritability for this complex disease is approximately 0.8070, indicating that a significant proportion of disease risk is attributable to genetic variation. A number of sex-specific genetic associations with schizophrenia risk have been reported, but none has been consistently replicated15.
