Many genes may play role in schizophrenia, UW researchers find
For many years scientists have been trying to find a genetic cause for schizophrenia, a devastating brain disorder that affects 1 in 100 Americans.
People with schizophrenia may hear voices, see things that are not there and have other delusions.
The risk for developing schizophrenia seems to run in some families, so researchers have thought that changes in a few genes might behind the disease.
But, to date, efforts to find those genes have been disappointing.
So researchers at the University of Washington, working in collaboration with scientists at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York state and the National Institute of Mental Health, tried a different strategy.
Instead of looking for individual genes that might have mutations, they scanned all the genes of a group of people with schizophrenia looking for a class of severe mutations wherever they might occur.
The results of the study was published online March 27 by the journal Science,
The UW team was led by Jon McClellan, a psychiatrist, and Tom Walsh and Mary-Clair King, geneticists. Tom Walsh was the paper’s lead author.
What they found was that people with schizophrenia were 3-times more likely to have such mutations than were people who did not have psychiatric disorders.
And people with a severe form of the disease in which schizophrenia typically begins before the age of 13, called childhood onset schizophrenia, were 4-times more likely to have such mutations.
The mutations seen in the people with schizophrenia were not the same, but they did tend to be in genes that play an important role in brain development.
The findings suggest that schizophrenia is not one disease caused by a few common mutations affecting a small number of genes but many a variety of similar disorders caused by different and rare kinds of mutations affecting a variety of genes.
In other words, there may be many different genetic pathways that lead to the symptoms of schizophrenia and perhaps other mental disorders, including depression, bipolar disorder and autism.
The findings, if confirmed, may some day make it possible to identify people at high risk of developing schizophrenia–and other mental disorders–and perhaps develop treatments to prevent or reduce the severity of the disease.
To learn more about the study:
- Read the news article about the study in ScienceNOW Daily News by Constance Holden “Rare Mutations Hint at Multiple Schizophrenias“
- Read the original study published online by Science.
- Read Tom Paulson’s article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Benedict Carey’s article in the New York Times.
To learn more about schizophrenia:
- Go to the schizophrenia information page on MedlinePlus, a service of the National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health.
- Download a 24-page pamphlet on schizophrenia prepared by the National Institute of Mental Health.
To find local services:
- Visit the Washington state mental health resource guide prepared by the US Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Agency.
Category: Genetics & Birth Defects, Mental Health, Uncategorized
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