Current diagnoses of schizophrenia and related psychiatric disorders are classified by phenomenological principles and clinical descriptions while ruling out other symptoms and conditions. Specific biomarkers are needed to assist the current diagnostic system. However, complicated gene and environment interactions induce great disease heterogeneity. This unclear etiology and heterogeneity raise difficulties in distinguishing schizophrenia-related effects. Simultaneously, the overlap in symptoms, genetic variations, and brain alterations in schizophrenia and related psychiatric disorders raises similar difficulties in determining disease-specific effects. Imaging genetics is a unique methodology to assess the impact of genetic factors on both brain structure and function. More importantly, imaging genetics builds a bridge to understand the behavioral and clinical implications of genetics and neuroimaging. By characterizing and quantifying the brain measures affected in psychiatric disorders, imaging genetics is contributing to identifying potential biomarkers for schizophrenia and related disorders. To date, candidate gene analysis, genome-wide association studies, polygenetic risk score analysis, and large-scale collaborative studies have made contributions to the understanding of schizophrenia with the potential to serve as biomarkers. Despite limitations, imaging genetics remains promising as more aggregative, clustering methods and imaging genetics-compatible clinical assessments are employed in future studies. We review imaging genetics’ contribution to our understanding of the heterogeneity within schizophrenia and the commonalities across schizophrenia and other diagnostic borders, and we will discuss whether imaging genetics is ready to form its own diagnostic system. The current review summarized genetics, imaging, and imaging genetics in schizophrenia to date. Imaging genetics may continue to shape the future conceptualization of SZ and psychotic disorders in both clinical and research field. One future direction is collecting a large number of genetic effects. The method applied by Arnedo et al. is promising in coupling both genetic and phenotypic clusters, but it may need to establish its association with imaging data or physiological measures. The clustering method shows great complexity, while its compatibility with neuroimaging is unknown. The other polygenic method like polygenic risk score is also promising. However, it will call for more common variations and the combination with other data (e.g., the B-SNIP biotype study). Parallel independent component analysis (pICA) may be another useful tool in this field. This method allows independent components from two modalities to be identified simultaneously, and the association between these two modalities is optimized. pICA is designed to be totally theoretically blind and data-driven, but pICA with reference allows a priori knowledge as the reference to improve robustness. For instance, a set of genes from the same pathway can be used as a reference to highlight their effect on certain brain components as well as behavioral data. Chen et al. used pICA and reported that the gray matter density of frontal, precuneus, and cingulate regions might potentially be affected by various genes participating in synaptic plasticity, axon guidance, and molecular signal transduction.

Journal of Blood Disorders & Transfusion (ISSN: 2155-9864// NLM I'D: 101630198) is a peer reviewed and open access journal aimed to publish most interesting and complete reliable source of information on current development and advanced research findings in the mode of original articles, review articles, case reports, short communications, etc. in all areas of the field and making them freely available through online without any restrictions or any other subscriptions to researchers worldwide.

Journal of Blood Disorders & Transfusion is an scholarly journal that focuses on all aspects of molecular genetics, pathophysiology and epidemiology as well as prevention, diagnosis, and management of blood disorders with current state of research in the field of transfusion medicine, hematology, hemato-oncology, pediatric hematology, laboratory hematology, neuropathy, blood donors, thalassemia, bone marrow transplantation, anti-HBc, haemodilution, hemodialysis, blood stem cell, blood disorders, Rh factor, blood cancer, platelet disorders, hemolytic anemia etc.

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John Robert
Journal of Blood Disorders & Transfusion
ISSN: 2155-9864| NLM ID: 101630198