In contrast to previous studies examining large sets of medical, anthropomorphic, metabolic, and behavioral phenotypes (B. Bulik-Sullivan et al. 2015; Zheng et al. 2016; Anttila et al. 2016; Shi et al. 2017; Ohn 2017), the present study performed a focused comparison of psychiatric and immune-related phenotypes using two methods to estimate genetic correlation from summary statistics. We used updated versions of psychiatric GWASs (Demontis et al. 2017; Anney et al. 2017; Arnold et al. 2017; Group 2011), and compiled a more comprehensive set of immune-related phenotypes, while simultaneously reducing the burden imposed by multiple testing. Additionally, this analysis reflects the first application of the LDSC and HESS method for some of these phenotype-pairs. We identified several genome-wide correlations that were robust to multiple testing. Furthermore, we used the HESS method to validate genome-wide correlations and to conduct a quantitative analysis that localizes correlations to regions of the genome. We prioritized the reporting of findings based on co-localization with GW hits. As such, this study provides a quantitative map of genetic relationships between psychiatric and immune-related disorders and serves, along with previous work (Wang et al. 2015), as a starting point for identifying and characterizing potentially pleiotropic loci.
