Genetic studies have been conducted primarily in samples of European ancestry; thus, results will be most applicable to those populations and will not be as predictive among individuals from different racial/ethnic backgrounds (Martin et al., 2017). This underrepresentation is a disservice to non-European populations, as well as to the scientific community tasked with providing information for all, in that it limits our understanding of the underlying etiology of psychiatric and substance use outcomes among individuals from more diverse populations (Dick et al., 2017). Genetically informed studies of racially/ethnically diverse populations can be used to examine how social and genetic environmental factors come together to influence psychiatric outcomes in specific populations, which have their own customs and pressures. It is not expected that the biological pathways through which genotypes affect psychiatric outcomes will differ across racial/ethnic groups; however, differences in disease allele frequency and linkage disequilibrium (LD) patterns may lead to outcome differences in the influence of specific genetic variants among diverse populations (Gelernter et al., 2014).
