First evidence of DNA link to schizophrenia
1 July 2009
Predicting whether people will suffer future schizophrenic episodes has been linked for the first time to specific regions in the human genome by an international research group.
A research paper, to be published in Nature on 1 July, compares the genomes of 9294 cases of schizophrenia to 20,050 control subjects, revealing that common variants on chromosome 6p22.1 in Europeans and 3q26.33 in African-Americans are associated with schizophrenia.
Dr Frank Dudbridge from the Medical Research Council Biostatistics Unit in Cambridge, part of the collaborative group on the project, said the evidence supported the theory that similar genetic mechanisms underly some forms of schizophrenia, autism and cognitive disability.
Dr Dudbridge said: “Schizophrenia, a devastating psychiatric disorder, affects around one in a hundred of the population but has a very high heritability of 80-85 per cent. These results demonstrate that common schizophrenia susceptibility variants can be detected. Studying these signals should suggest important directions for research on susceptibility to these disorders.”
Scientists carried out a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of common single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the Molecular Genetics of Schizophrenia (MGS) case-control sample, and then a meta-analysis of data from the MGS, International Schizophrenia Consortium (ISC) and SGENE datasets.
The link could be found in DNAJC19, a gene in the associated region of 3q26.33 that has previously been shown to be involved in neurological disorders. DNAJC19 is one of several genes that encode mitochondrial proteins in which mutations cause neurodegenerative disorders and ataxia.
Notes for editors
- This study was funded by the US National Institute of Mental Health and National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression. Genotyping was carried out by the Centre for Genotyping and Analysis at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT with support from the National Centre for Research Resources (USA), the Genetic Association Information Network and by The Paul Michael Donovan Charitable Foundation.
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