How to define psychiatric disorder patients from GTEx?

Question

[thejustpark]

Dear Biostar users,

I recently downloaded GTEx data to study psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, Alzheimer's disease and substance disorder. The first thing to do is to strategy samples based on (the risk or incidence) of such disorders. However, I cannot find a manual or a paper describing how to use their phenotypes to identify disorder samples vs. normal samples. Can you please help me locate any resource to do this with?

Thanks, HJ

[Friederike]

I agree with Ian, I think the only metadata about the donors is shown here: https://gtexportal.org/home/tissueSummaryPage

--> Sex, Age, Cause of Death

We may be mistaken though -- what made you believe there were donors with psychiatric disorders in there?

[thejustpark]

Thank you very much Ian and Freiderike,

Your comments actually alert me on my investigation direction. Since many papers used GTEx data in their research for those psychiatric disorders, I somehow thought that GTEx would have such phenotypes. However, after spending two days, I could not find an exact identification criteria for samples with the disorder. And now, with your comments, I think I failed, because they don't have such disorders directly and the papers might have used GTEx data in an indirect way.

Thank you very much again Ian and Friederike, HJ

[Friederike]

Ah, I see. Those papers may use them as control samples.

Answer 1

[i.sudbery]

As far as I am aware, GTEx contains only samples from healthy people.