Despite these limitations, the current analyses aimed at using refined phenotypes to help us to better understand genetic pathways of risk for externalizing disorders. Because individual phenotypes may serve as indicators of some broader underlying risk, efforts focused on understanding the genetic comorbidity underlying multiple disorders with a shared genetic architecture are likely to be fruitful. Future efforts utilizing new methods, such as Genomic SEM (Grotzinger et al., 2019), that can leverage summary statistics from multiple well-powered GWAS of traits on the externalizing spectrum may be able to identify genetic variants through examining the overlapping genetic architecture among these traits.
