Abstract
Many neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric disorders are highly heritable. While clear genetic precursors have been found for some of these diseases, there are many others -- such as bipolar disorder and Alzheimer's disease -- which have yet to be fully understood. As evidence accumulates across more and more studies, the growing consensus is that these complex disorders are likely to be heterogeneous at the genetic and/or phenotypic level.
In this talk we'll discuss some of the challenges associated with characterizing the different kinds of heterogeneity that might be present in these disorders. We'll also present some of our recent results, where we identified replicable genetically-driven subtypes in both bipolar-disorder and Alzheimer's disease.