Australian Genetics of Bipolar Disorder Study (GBP)

Approximately 750,000 Australians have lived experience of bipolar disorder which is a severe psychiatric disorder that is highly heritable (genetic factors explain 60-85 per cent of the risk of developing bipolar disorder).

In 2018 a nation-wide cohort of 6682 adults living with bipolar disorder was recruited by Professor Sarah Medland and Associate Professor Penelope Lind in the Psychiatric Genetics group at QIMR Berghofer. The primary goal of the GBP Study is to improve our understanding of the genetic risk factors that influence treatment response, symptom severity, and risk of developing bipolar disorder.

In 2023 we published a paper describing preliminary results from the GBP Study. These included the finding that adverse drug reactions to medications used to treat bipolar disorder were common, with one- to two-thirds of participants reporting that they stopped taking their medication due to these side-effects. We also observed that the majority of participants reported being diagnosed with co-occurring mental health disorders.

We have also contributed GBP data to the latest (and largest) international Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (PGC) genome-wide association study (GWAS) of bipolar disorder which was published in 2025. In that study data from 158,036 bipolar disorder cases and 2.8 million controls from 79 cohorts were analysed together and a total of 298 chromosomal regions (loci) associated with bipolar disorder were identified. This was more than a four-fold increase in the number of loci identified compared to the previous PGC GWAS of bipolar disorder. Overall, this important study has further contributed to our understanding of the biology underlying bipolar disorder by identifying 36 key genes involved in bipolar disorder and finding that the genetic signal of bipolar disorder was related to specific brain cell types as well as brain-related processes.

If you are aged 18 or over and would like to participate in the GBP study, please visit https://www.geneticsofbipolar.org.au/