The major aim of this study was to evaluate the hypothesis-driven candidate gene literature for schizophrenia with respect to a large GWAS dataset. Hypothesis-driven candidate gene studies have been a major approach to the molecular etiology of schizophrenia. However, we now can perform analyses orders of magnitude more detailed than were possible even five years ago. We wished to determine whether the systematic investigations now allowed by GWAS supported this body of work in aggregate and the degree to which GWAS empirical results support the over-arching concepts that influenced candidate gene selection. We highlight that we did not conduct meta-analyses of the findings of hypothesis-driven candidate gene studies as this has been done elsewhere (Allen et al., 2008).
