Associations between brain gene expression perturbations implicated by COVID-19 and psychiatric disorders

Background: Currently, there is increasing evidence from clinic, epidemiology, as well as neuroimaging, demonstrating neuropsychiatric abnormalities in COVID-19, however, whether there were associations between brain changes caused by COVID-19 and genetic susceptibility of psychiatric disorders was still unknown.Methods: In this study, we performed a meta-analysis to investigate these associations by combing single-cell RNA sequencing datasets of brain tissues of COVID-19 and genome-wide association study summary statistics of psychiatric disorders.Results: The analysis demonstrated that among ten psychiatric disorders, gene expression perturbations impli-cated by COVID-19 in excitatory neurons of choroid plexus were significantly associated with schizophrenia.Conclusions: Our analysis might provide insights for the underlying mechanism of the psychiatric consequence of COVID-19.