BreakThrough Digest Medical News |
| Study provides strongest clues to date for causes of schizophrenia Posted: 24 Aug 2013 09:00 PM PDT A new genome-wide association study (GWAS) estimates the number of different places in the human genome that are involved in schizophrenia. In particular, the study identifies 22 locations, including 13 that are newly discovered, that are believed to play a role in causing schizophrenia.
“If finding the causes of schizophrenia is like solving a jigsaw puzzle, then these new results give us the corners and some of the pieces on the edges,” said study lead author Patrick F. Sullivan, MD. “We’ve debated this for a century, and we are now zeroing in on answers.” “This study gives us the clearest picture to date of two different pathways that might be going wrong in people with schizophrenia,” Sullivan said. “Now we need to concentrate our research very urgently on these two pathways in our quest to understand what causes this disabling mental illness.” Sullivan is a professor in the departments of Genetics and Psychiatry and director of the Center for Psychiatric Genomics at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. The new study was published online Sunday, Aug. 25, 2013 by the journal Nature Genetics. The results are based on a multi-stage analysis that began with a Swedish national sample of 5,001 schizophrenia cases and 6,243 controls, followed by a meta analysis of previous GWAS studies, and finally by replication of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in 168 genomic regions in independent samples. The total number of people in the study was more than 59,000. One of the two pathways identified by the study, Sullivan said, is a calcium channel pathway. This pathway includes the genes CACNA1C and CACNB2, whose proteins touch each other as part of an important process in nerve cells. The other is the “micro-RNA 137″ pathway. This pathway includes its namesake gene, MIR137 ? which is a known regulator of neuronal development ? and at least a dozen other genes regulated by MIR137. “What’s really exciting about this is that now we can use standard, off-the-shelf genomic technologies to help us fill in the missing pieces,” Sullivan said. “We now have a clear and obvious path to getting a fairly complete understanding of the genetic part of schizophrenia. That wouldn’t have been possible five years ago.” ### Collaborators in the study include co-authors from the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York. Funding for the study included grants from the National Institutes of Mental Health (R01 MH077139), the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research, the Sylvan Herman Foundation, the Karolinska Institutet, and the Swedish Research Council. Contact: Tom Hughes |
| Outgoing people lead happier lives Posted: 16 Jul 2013 09:00 PM PDT Research from the University of Southampton has shown that young adults, who are more outgoing or more emotionally stable, are happier in later life than their more introverted or less emotionally stable peers.
In the study, published in the Journal of Research in Personality, Dr Catharine Gale from the Medical Research Council’s Lifecourse Epidemiology Unit, University of Southampton and a team from the University of Edinburgh and University College London, examined the effects of neuroticism and extraversion at ages 16 and 26 years on mental wellbeing and life satisfaction at age 60 to 64 and explored the mediating roles of psychological and physical health. They found that personality dispositions by the time of early adulthood have an enduring influence on well-being decades later. Dr Gale, Reader in Epidemiology, comments: “Few studies have examined the long-term influence of personality traits in youth on happiness and life satisfaction later in life. We found that extroversion in youth had direct, positive effects on wellbeing and life satisfaction in later life. Neuroticism, in contrast, had a negative impact, largely because it tends to make people more susceptible to feelings of anxiety and depression and to physical health problems. ” The study examined data on 4,583 people who are members of the National Survey for Health and Development, conducted by the Medical Research Council. All were born in 1946; they completed a short personality inventory at age 16, and again at age 26. Extroversion was assessed by questions about their sociability, energy, and activity orientation. Neuroticism was assessed by questions about their emotional stability, mood, and distractibility. Decades later, when the participants were 60 to 64-years-old, 2,529 of them answered a series of questions measuring well-being and their level of satisfaction with life. They also reported on their mental and physical health. Their answers point to a distinct pattern. Contact: Becky Attwood Specifically, greater extroversion, as assessed in young adulthood, was directly associated with higher scores for well-being and for satisfaction with life. Neuroticism, in contrast, predicted poorer levels of wellbeing, but it did so indirectly. People higher in neuroticism as young adults were more susceptible to psychological distress later in life and to a lesser extent, poorer physical health. Dr Gale adds: “Understanding what determines how happy people feel in later life is of particular interest because there is good evidence that happier people tend to live longer. In this study we found that levels of neuroticism and extraversion measured over 40 years earlier were strongly predictive of well-being and life satisfaction in older men and women. Personality in youth appears to have an enduring influence on happiness decades later.” ### |
| You are subscribed to email updates from BreakThrough Digest Medical News To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
