Identify Commonly Affected Pathways in Psychiatric Diseases

Abstract

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) are an extraordinary source of information when it comes to revealing the common variations of human complex diseases. Until now, the large amount of data generated from these studies have not been shown its full potential enough to identify the molecular and functional framework to be able to understand how a molecular system works. Following a more specific perspective, this study focused on the identification of commonly affected pathways of psychiatric diseases. The pathway term as used in molecular biology, depicts a simplified model of a process within the cell or tissue. Lately, several GWAS datasets are publicly available for various disease types such as psychiatric, immune-related, neurodegenerative, cardiovascular and such. A study on each disease and pairwise comparison to understand the behavior of disease and system would be time consuming and exhaustive. Instead of handling the results of these studies one by one, grouping diseases by target points is a more efficient way. This work aims to get one step closer to reveal key points of diseases and target these points to develop personalized medicine approaches. Especially for complex diseases, every drug doesn't show the same effect in every people. This paper contains the definition of molecular pathways, methods to identify disease related pathways, and to find common pathways pairwise in psychiatric diseases.