Studies from the fields of genetic epidemiology, clinical psychiatry, behavioral neuroscience and neuroimaging suggest that the BDNF Val66Met polymorphism may not be a major risk allele for the development of schizophrenia per se, but the polymorphism modulates a range of clinical features of the illness, including age of onset, symptoms, therapeutic responsiveness, neurocognitive function and brain morphology (Notaras et al., 2015a). Here, BDNF is linked to schizophrenia.