Combinations of genetic variants associated with bipolar disorder

The main objective of the study was to find genetic variants that in combination are significantly associated with bipolar disorder. In previous studies of bipolar disorder, combinations of three and four single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) genotypes taken from 803 SNPs were analyzed, and five clusters of combinations were found to be significantly associated with bipolar disorder. In the present study, combinations of ten SNP genotypes taken from the same 803 SNPs were analyzed, and one cluster of combinations was found to be significantly associated with bipolar disorder. Combinations from the new cluster and from the five previous clusters were identified in the genomes of 266 or 44% of the 607 patients in the study whereas none of the 1355 control participants had any of these combinations in their genome.The SNP genotypes in the smaller combinations were the normal homozygote, heterozygote or variant homozygote. In the combinations containing 10 SNP genotypes almost all the genotypes were the normal homozygote. Such a finding may indicate that accumulation in the genome of combinations containing few SNP genotypes may be a risk factor for bipolar disorder when those combinations contain relatively many rare SNP genotypes, whereas combinations need to contain many SNP genotypes to be a risk factor when most of the SNP genotypes are the normal homozygote.