Around a third of the data in ENIGMA is from patients with psychiatric illness, so once ENIGMA1 was complete, a large volume of new data could be brought to bear on the question of brain differences in a variety of disorders. To make connections between psychiatric risk genes and brain measures, it may make sense to prioritize brain measures with robust case–control differences. Of course, robust case–control differences do not, in themselves, imply that the same genetic variants influencing the phenotype will be the same as those associated with disease risk. A more informed way to rank brain measures for genetic screening is to use the endophenotype ranking value (ERV; Glahn et al. 2012), which aims to rank biomarkers in terms of their promise as endophenotypes for any heritable illness.
