Complex traits, mental health, and how we think about genetic prediction

Professor Sarah Medland works across a range of mental health conditions including depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and ADHD. She leads the Psychiatric Genetics group at QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute, specializing in the development and application of analytic methods and in the design, collection and analysis of large and complex data sets. Sarah prefers to work within cross-disciplinary projects that bring together the skills and knowledge of colleagues who work in clinical, research and community contexts.

Much of the work on polygenic risk score (PRS) analysis focuses on maximizing the prediction of case status at a group level. However, the scenario confronting clinicians is more commonly that an individual presents with symptoms that might fit more than one diagnostic criterion. While PRS summarize genetic risk across the life span, comorbidity and changes to presentation over time are common. Thus, the relationship between PRS results and presenting problem at a given time is not straightforward and approaches to incorporate PRS into clinical practice need to consider differential diagnosis, comorbidity and temporal agnosticism.

Series details

The seminar series aims to provide those with interests in Indigenous Genomics research to improve and develop their knowledge and understanding across the key topics. The seminars aim to provide a broad spectrum of topics across the field.

An up to date list of seminar speakers and their planned topics will be available on the ALIGN website

Please contact us if you have any questions or suggestions for speakers: ALIGN@telethonkids.org.au

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