Pathway-Specific Polygenic Scores for Predicting Clinical Lithium Treatment Response in Patients With Bipolar Disorder

Background: Polygenic scores (PGSs) hold the potential to identify patients who respond favorably to specific psychiatric treatments. However, their biological interpretation remains unclear. In this study, we developed pathway-specific PGSs (PS_PGSs) for lithium response and assessed their association with clinical lithium response in patients with bipolar disorder. Methods: Using sets of genes involved in pathways affected by lithium, we developed 9 PS_PGSs and evaluated their associations with lithium response in the International Consortium on Lithium Genetics (ConLi⁺Gen) (N = 2367), with validation in combined PsyCourse (Pathomechanisms and Signatures in the Longitudinal Course of Psychosis) (N = 105) and BipoLife (N = 102) cohorts. The association between each PS_PGS and lithium response—defined both as a continuous ALDA score and a categorical outcome (good vs. poor responses)—was evaluated using regression models, with adjustment for confounders. The cutoff for a significant association was p < .05 after multiple testing correction. Results: The PGSs for acetylcholine, GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid), and mitochondria were associated with response to lithium in both categorical and continuous outcomes. However, the PGSs for calcium channel, circadian rhythm, and GSK (glycogen synthase kinase) were associated only with the continuous outcome. Each score explained 0.29% to 1.91% of the variance in the categorical and 0.30% to 1.54% of the variance in the continuous outcomes. A multivariate model combining PS_PGSs that showed significant associations in the univariate analysis (combined PS_PGS) increased the percentage of variance explained (R²) to 3.71% and 3.18% for the categorical and continuous outcomes, respectively. Associations for PGSs for GABA and circadian rhythm were replicated. Patients with the highest genetic loading (10th decile) for acetylcholine variants were 3.03 times more likely (95% CI, 1.95 to 4.69) to show a good lithium response (categorical outcome) than patients with the lowest genetic loading (1st decile). Conclusions: PS_PGSs achieved predictive performance comparable to the conventional genome-wide PGSs, with the added advantage of biological interpretability using a smaller list of genetic variants.