ENIGMA-Relatives

The ENIGMA-Relatives working group is an international collaboration between research groups who collect MRI scans of first-degree relatives of patients with severe mental illness and compare those with controls (and their probands). Our first prospective meta-analysis on global and subcortical volumes in first-degree relatives of patients with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder (i.e. offspring, siblings, MZ/DZ twins, parents) has been submitted. It includes 34 schizophrenia and/or bipolar disorder family cohorts, including brain scans from more than 2000 first degree relatives, more than 2500 controls, and over 1600 patients. We are actively developing other projects using the same meta-analytic techniques. Prof. Neeltje van Haren and Sonja de Zwarte are co-chairs of this working group.

We are happy to welcome new cohorts at any time! If you are interested in participating in the working group, please contact Neeltje van Haren, Sonja de Zwarte or Rachel Brouwer. We are always open to new datasets and collaborators. The only prerequisite is that you be willing to follow the ENIGMA MOU guidelines. To get started, you should usually run your dataset through the current ENIGMA Imaging Protocols (found here here), and we can help you with that. What is required generally is the willingness to run the needed scripts on your imaging and demographic/clinical/cognitive data.

A list of participating groups (updated Nov 2018) can be found here.