# Sex Chromosome GWAS of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

> **NIH NIH R21** · STANFORD UNIVERSITY · 2021 · $208,054

## Abstract

Project summary
The untreated burden of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the United States is a massive contributor to
healthcare budgets in both the civilian and military sectors, and better treatment and prevention methods are
needed. One of the most powerful predictors of who will develop a particular psychiatric disorder – including
PTSD – is sex/gender. Women are diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, eating
disorders, and certain anxiety disorders approximately two to three times as often as men. Conversely, males
are up to four times more likely to be diagnosed with autism and substance use disorders. In psychiatry, there
are few factors that reliably confer fold-change differences in risk, but sex differences are an exception.
Remarkably, the reasons for sex differences in prevalence of PTSD and other disorders remain relatively
unexplained. Large-scale genetic studies, such as genome-wide association studies (GWAS), have
demonstrated genetic effects on PTSD and other psychiatric disorders. However, a notable gap in the
literature is the omission of the X and Y chromosomes from nearly all major psychiatric GWAS. Here we
propose sex chromosome GWAS of large representative PTSD samples as a critical first step towards the
inclusion of sex chromosomes in all major psychiatric GWAS. Building upon our prior work leading analyses
for international groups, we will implement robust pipelines for sex chromosome analyses, which will expand
sex chromosome analysis to PTSD. This work will also provide the necessary analytic workflows and
collaboration building for future sex chromosome GWAS of all major psychiatric disorders. The field is almost
completely in the dark regarding sex-chromosome contributions to psychiatric disorders, and it is critical that
we identify sex chromosome loci and test for disproportionate contributions of sex chromosomes to genetic risk
for disorders like PTSD and depression, in order to discover novel clues about disease etiology. This work
may help to explain well-known sex differences in prevalence of psychiatric disorders, and sex chromosome
findings may prove critical for the development of treatment and preventative strategies for these debilitating
and costly disorders.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10304019
- **Project number:** 1R21MH125358-01A1
- **Recipient organization:** STANFORD UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** Laramie Duncan
- **Activity code:** R21 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $208,054
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2021-07-19 → 2023-06-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10304019

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10304019, Sex Chromosome GWAS of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) (1R21MH125358-01A1). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10304019. Licensed CC0.

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