Chunk #18 — Using Results from the GWAS of the International Schizophrenia Consortium as an Example, Are the Results of Dickson et al. Supported by Empirical Observation?
In 2009, the International Schizophrenia Consortium (ISC) reported an analysis that supported a genetic model for schizophrenia that included a substantial number of common variants of small effect. Dickson et al. claimed, of the ISC analysis, that multiple rare variants in a region are capable of acting over large distances to create associations in common variants similar to those observed by the ISC. However, as we have shown above, a genetic architecture dominated by rare causal variants leads to a distribution of risk alleles of detected associations skewed to low frequencies, which is not consistent with the ISC data, as we show below.
