From STAT news: “Far be it from us to tell 23andMe how to run its business, but if it or any other DNA company wants to give customers a better read of disease risk they might start asking how mom’s pregnancy went.”
That’s the key message of a schizophrenia study published Monday, which showed that 108 regions of the genome previously identified as raising the risk of schizophrenia do so only slightly if the mother experiences no complications during pregnancy — but by some 12-fold if she does. Taking into account prenatal conditions gives a starkly different read of how risky schizophrenia-risk genes are: taken together, they raise the chance of developing the disease to 12 in 1,000 if there are no complications — or to 80 in 1,000 if there are.
