Since the mid-1990s, hundreds of structural MRI studies have been performed to characterize brain phenotypes in health and disease. Large-scale neuroimaging studies have reported widespread lower cortical thickness (CT) in various psychiatric and neurological disorders relative to healthy controls [1–7]. It has also been demonstrated that there is substantial similarity in structural abnormalities across psychiatric and neurological disorders [8–10], which has been linked to shared genetic risks. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) with population-based samples have yielded substantial empirical and quantitative molecular support for shared neurobiological risk factors across most psychiatric disorders [11–15]. For instance, one investigation of pleiotropy in a large sample (N >700,000 participants; 8 psychiatric disorders) identified 109 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) linked to at least two psychiatric disorders [14].
