Focus

Publication date: 01 August 2006

Publication date: 01 August 2006

Publication date: 01 August 2006

Genetic etiology plays at least a partial role in most psychiatric disorders. Consistently replicated linkage and association findings of psychiatric disorders are, however, rare. Multiple genetic risk factors are likely to interact with each other and ...

Publication date: 01 August 2006

Many important psychiatric disorders have a strong hereditary component, posing the problem of characterizing the biological mechanisms translating from the genetic level to that of complex social and behavioral abnormalities. The new field of imaging ...

Publication date: 01 August 2006

The field of psychiatric genomics has developed dramatically over the past 10 years. The essential goal of psychiatric pharmacogenomics is to measure genetic variation in individual patients to predict their response to psychotropic medications. The ...

Publication date: 01 August 2006

Publication date: 01 August 2006

Publication date: 01 August 2006

Genetic variation in neuregulin 1 (NRG1) is associated with schizophrenia. The disease-associated SNPs are noncoding, and their functional implications remain unknown. We hypothesized that differential expression of the NRG1 gene explains its association ...

Publication date: 01 August 2006

Neurobiological factors contributing to violence in humans remain poorly understood. One approach to this question is examining allelic variation in the X-linked monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) gene, previously associated with impulsive aggression in animals ...

Publication date: 01 August 2006

Schizophrenia is a devastating psychiatric disorder that affects ~1% of the population worldwide. It is characterized by so-called ‘positive symptoms’–including delusions and hallucinations–‘negative symptoms’–including blunted emotions and social ...

Publication date: 01 August 2006

Human brain maturation is a complex, lifelong process that can now be examined in detail using neuroimaging techniques. Ongoing projects scan subjects longitudinally with structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), enabling the time-course and anatomical ...

Publication date: 01 August 2006

A central phrase in the new “GeneTalk” is “X is a gene for Y,” in which X is a particular gene on the human genome and Y is a complex human disorder or trait. This article begins by sketching the historical origins of this phrase and the concept of the ...

Publication date: 01 August 2006

The addictions are common chronic psychiatric diseases that today are prevented and treated using relatively untargeted and only partially effective methods. The addictions are moderately to highly heritable, which is paradoxical because these disorders ...

Publication date: 01 August 2006

Genetic research has moved from Mendelian genetics to sequence maps to the study of natural human genetic variation at the level of the genome. This past decade of discovery has been accompanied by a shift in emphasis towards the ethical principles of ...

Publication date: 01 August 2006

Schizophrenia has long been thought to be clinically heterogeneous. A range of studies suggests that this is due to genetic heterogeneity. Some clinical features, such as negative symptoms, are associated with a greater risk of illness in relatives. ...

Publication date: 01 August 2006

Pharmacogenetics is the study of the role of inheritance in inter-individual variation in drug response. Since its origins in the mid-twentieth century, a major driving force in pharmacogenetics research has been the promise of individualized drug therapy ...

Publication date: 01 August 2006

Medical genetics was revolutionized during the 1980s by the application of genetic mapping to locate the genes responsible for simple Mendelian diseases. Most diseases and traits, however, do not follow simple inheritance patterns. Geneticists have thus ...