The Effects of Polygenic Interactions on Mental Health
A special issue of Genes (ISSN 2073-4425). This special issue belongs to the section "Neurogenomics".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 25 August 2026 | Viewed by 28
Special Issue Editor
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Advances in genomic analyses in the past decade, coupled with increasingly large and diverse multi-ancestry cohorts, have enabled polygenic risk estimations for complex diseases to become more widespread. Mental health and neuropsychiatric conditions, however, present unique challenges to this trend. They are often the result of both environmental and biological risk factors, and reflect an interplay of genetic and downstream influences. Because of this complexity, there have historically been challenges to investigating the polygenic effects in neuropsychiatry compared to physical diseases. But emerging cohorts and methodological innovations now enable new opportunities to leverage sophisticated polygenic estimation to investigate their relationship with other epigenomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic analyses, and reveal how genetic susceptibility interacts with environmental risk factors.
These advances hold transformative potential for mental health care. Characterizing both biological and environmental interactions with polygenic models can support early identification of individuals at heightened risk, inform prevention strategies and allocation, and aid in the development of treatment stratification through precision medicine. Additionally, when integrated with clinical data, they may enhance screening and refine risk modeling. This holistic understanding is critical to innovative investigation of polygenic risks that elucidate the mechanisms that lead to mental health conditions.
Dr. Henri M. Garrison-Desany
Guest Editor
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Keywords
- polygenic risk
- neuropsychiatric disorders
- psychiatric genetics
- interaction analyses
- gene-environment interactions
- multiomics
- precision psychiatry
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