Papers of the Week

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a leading cause of disease-associated disability, with much of the increased burden due to psychiatric and medical comorbidity. This comorbidity partly reflects common genetic influences across conditions. Integrating molecular-genetic tools with health records enables tests of association with the broad range of physiological and clinical phenotypes. However, standard phenome-wide association studies analyze associations with individual genetic variants. For polygenic traits such as MDD, aggregate measures of genetic risk may yield greater insight into associations across the clinical phenome.