THL Psychiatric Family Collections

The THL Psychiatric Family Collections include families ascertained for schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder and bipolar spectrum disorder. The objective of the study is to identify the genetic risk factors for serious psychiatric disorders in Finnish families. Finnish families, where at least one family member has a serious mental illness, were invited to take part in the study. Families were recruited country-wide, and the diagnosis of each patient was reliably validated based on DSM-IV criteria. The 180 BPD families include individuals born between 1940 and 1969 and hospitalized with a diagnosis of BPD and their family members (N=678). For schizophrenia, in 1994–2008, the study’s participants consisted of 3405 individuals from 734 families where a member of the family has schizophrenia.

Samples and data available in THL Biobank

A brief introduction to the THL Psychiatric Family Collections and description of the material available in THL Biobank can be found in the 'Read me first' file.

For participants of the THL Psychiatric Family Collections DNA sample is available through THL Biobank. In addition for a subset of sample donors also a cell sample is available. For more detailed information, please see the 'THL Biobank Sample availability table'.

Detailed list of attributes available in the biobank can be found in the variable descriptions file.

Genome-wide SNP data is available for majority of the study participants, for more detailed information, please see the 'THL Biobank Omics availability table'.

Limitation of use

Please note that THL Psychiatric Family Collections can only be used for research on psychiatric diseases. Exceptionally the transfer to biobank does not broaden the range of use for these samples and related data.