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Psychiatric epidemiology is a field which studies the causes (etiology) of mental disorders in society, as well as conceptualization and prevalence of mental illness. It is a subfield of the more general epidemiology. It has roots in sociological studies of the early 20th century. However, while sociological exposures are still widely studied in psychiatric epidemiology, the field has since expanded to the study of a wide area of environmental risk factors, such as major life events, as well as genetic exposures. Increasingly neuroscientific techniques like MRI are used to explore the mechanisms behind how exposures to risk factors may impact psychological problems and explore the neuroanatomical substrate underlying psychiatric disorders.
The biopsychiatry controversy is a dispute over which viewpoint should predominate and form a basis of psychiatric theory and practice. The debate is a criticism of a claimed strict biological view of psychiatric thinking. Its critics include disparate groups such as the antipsychiatry movement and some academics.
Psychiatric genetics is a subfield of behavioral neurogenetics and behavioral genetics which studies the role of genetics in the development of mental disorders. The basic principle behind psychiatric genetics is that genetic polymorphisms are part of the causation of psychiatric disorders.
Peter McGuffin is a psychiatrist and geneticist from Belfast, Northern Ireland.
Risk factors of schizophrenia include many genetic and environmental phenomena. The prevailing model of schizophrenia is that of a special neurodevelopmental disorder with no precise boundary or single cause. Schizophrenia is thought to develop from very complex gene–environment interactions with vulnerability factors. The interactions of these risk factors are intricate, as numerous and diverse medical insults from conception to adulthood can be involved. The combination of genetic and environmental factors leads to deficits in the neural circuits that affect sensory input and cognitive functions. Historically, this theory has been broadly accepted but impossible to prove given ethical limitations. The first definitive proof that schizophrenia arises from multiple biological changes in the brain was recently established in human tissue grown from patient stem cells, where the complexity of disease was found to be "even more complex than currently accepted" due to cell-by-cell encoding of schizophrenia-related neuropathology.
Disrupted in schizophrenia 1 is a protein that in humans is encoded by the DISC1 gene. In coordination with a wide array of interacting partners, DISC1 has been shown to participate in the regulation of cell proliferation, differentiation, migration, neuronal axon and dendrite outgrowth, mitochondrial transport, fission and/or fusion, and cell-to-cell adhesion. Several studies have shown that unregulated expression or altered protein structure of DISC1 may predispose individuals to the development of schizophrenia, clinical depression, bipolar disorder, and other psychiatric conditions. The cellular functions that are disrupted by permutations in DISC1, which lead to the development of these disorders, have yet to be clearly defined and are the subject of current ongoing research. Although, recent genetic studies of large schizophrenia cohorts have failed to implicate DISC1 as a risk gene at the gene level, the DISC1 interactome gene set was associated with schizophrenia, showing evidence from genome-wide association studies of the role of DISC1 and interacting partners in schizophrenia susceptibility.
Neurogenomics is the study of how the genome of an organism influences the development and function of its nervous system. This field intends to unite functional genomics and neurobiology in order to understand the nervous system as a whole from a genomic perspective.
Behavioural genetics, also referred to as behaviour genetics, is a field of scientific research that uses genetic methods to investigate the nature and origins of individual differences in behaviour. While the name "behavioural genetics" connotes a focus on genetic influences, the field broadly investigates the extent to which genetic and environmental factors influence individual differences, using research designs that allow removal of the confounding of genes and environment. Behavioural genetics was founded as a scientific discipline by Francis Galton in the late 19th century, only to be discredited through association with eugenics movements before and during World War II. In the latter half of the 20th century, the field saw renewed prominence with research on inheritance of behaviour and mental illness in humans, as well as research on genetically informative model organisms through selective breeding and crosses. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, technological advances in molecular genetics made it possible to measure and modify the genome directly. This led to major advances in model organism research and in human studies, leading to new scientific discoveries.
The Center for Applied Genomics is a research center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia that focuses on genomics research and the utilization of basic research findings in the development of new medical treatments.
Alexander Bogdan ("Bob") Niculescu, III is a Romanian born, San Diego, California, educated and trained scientist and physician. He is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis, Indiana, Director of the Laboratory of Neurophenomics, and an Attending Psychiatrist and R&D Investigator at the Indianapolis VA Medical Center. Considered the inventor of Convergent Functional Genomics (CFG), he is a prominent figure in the field of personalized medicine in psychiatry. His early contributions to the psychiatric genetics field include identification of candidate genes, pathways and mechanisms for bipolar disorder using convergent studies In particular, his work and that of his collaborators has focused attention on circadian clock genes as core components of mood regulation Since these contributions, his research program has expanded to include similar work on schizophrenia alcoholism and stress disorders leading to the identification of panels of DNA and RNA markers for disease risk prediction and severity of illness. Niculescu pioneered early on the view that psychiatric disorders are genetically complex, heterogeneous, and overlapping, requiring gene level integration of data followed by pathway analyses. The cumulative combinatorics of common variants and environment model he described for bipolar and other complex disorders based on empirical data, is being increasingly supported by evidence from other groups working on psychiatric and non-psychiatric disorders. More recently, he has proposed a comprehensive unifying model (Mindscape) for conceptualizing how the mind works. His most recent work has focused on understanding and developing genomic and clinical risk predictors for suicide, a preventable tragedy and increasing public health problem.
The imprinted brain hypothesis is an unsubstantiated hypothesis in evolutionary psychology regarding the causes of autism spectrum and schizophrenia spectrum disorders, first presented by Bernard Crespi and Christopher Badcock in 2008. It claims that certain autistic and schizotypal traits are opposites, and that this implies the etiology of the two conditions must be at odds.
The "missing heritability" problem is the fact that single genetic variations cannot account for much of the heritability of diseases, behaviors, and other phenotypes. This is a problem that has significant implications for medicine, since a person's susceptibility to disease may depend more on 'the combined effect of all the genes in the background than on the disease genes in the foreground', or the role of genes may have been severely overestimated.
Cathryn Lewis is Professor of Genetic Epidemiology and Statistics at King's College London. She is Head of Department at the Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience.
Pamela Sklar was an American psychiatrist and neuroscientist. She was Chair of the Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences and professor of psychiatry, neuroscience, and genetic and genomic sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She was also chief of the Division of Psychiatric Genomics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Sklar is known for her large-scale gene discovery studies in bipolar disorder and schizophrenia and for making some of the first statistically meaningful gene identifications in both mental illnesses.
The Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard is a multi-disciplinary biomedical research program located in Cambridge, Massachusetts that studies the biological basis of psychiatric disease.
Patrick F. Sullivan FRANZCP is an American psychiatric geneticist. He is the Yeargen Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Genetics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he is also the director of the Center for Psychiatric Genomics and the lead principal investigator of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium. He is also a professor at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden. His research focuses on the genetics of schizophrenia, major depressive disorders such as post-partum depression, eating disorders, and autism.
Ming Tso Tsuang is an American psychiatrist and Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego. He is considered a pioneering researcher in the genetic epidemiology of schizophrenia and other severe mental disorders. Tsuang has authored and co-authored more than 600 publications and serves as founding and senior editor of the American Journal of Medical Genetics Part B.
Michael C. O'Donovan is a Scottish psychiatric geneticist who researches the genetics of schizophrenia. He is a clinical professor in the Division of Psychological Medicine and Clinical Neurosciences and the deputy director of the MRC Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics at the Cardiff University School of Medicine in Cardiff, Wales. He also leads the Schizophrenia Group of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium. Educated at Glasgow University, he also serves as Academic Psychiatry Lead for the Royal College of Psychiatrists in Wales. He was lead author of a 2014 study in Nature which identified over 100 genetic loci associated with an increased risk of schizophrenia. The study, the largest of its kind undertaken at the time, was covered extensively in the media. It was also praised by Thomas Insel, the then-director of the National Institute of Mental Health, who described the study as "a big step forward".
In statistical genetics, linkage disequilibrium score regression is a technique that aims to quantify the separate contributions of polygenic effects and various confounding factors, such as population stratification, based on summary statistics from genome-wide association studies (GWASs). The approach involves using regression analysis to examine the relationship between linkage disequilibrium scores and the test statistics of the single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) from the GWAS. Here, the "linkage disequilibrium score" for a SNP "is the sum of LD r2 measured with all other SNPs".
Heather Clare Whalley is a Scottish scientist. She is a senior research fellow in Neuroimaging at the Centre for Clinical Brain Sciences, University of Edinburgh., and is an affiliate member of the Centre for Genomic and Experimental Medicine at the University of Edinburgh. Her main focus of research is on the mechanisms underlying the development of major psychiatric disorders using the latest genomic and neuroimaging approaches.
References
- 1 2 Sullivan, Patrick F.; Agrawal, Arpana; Bulik, Cynthia M.; Andreassen, Ole A.; Børglum, Anders D.; Breen, Gerome; Cichon, Sven; Edenberg, Howard J.; Faraone, Stephen V. (2018-01-01). "Psychiatric Genomics: An Update and an Agenda". The American Journal of Psychiatry. 175 (1): 15–27. doi:10.1176/appi.ajp.2017.17030283. ISSN 1535-7228. PMC 5756100 . PMID 28969442.
- 1 2 3 "What is the PGC?". Psychiatric Genomics Consortium. Retrieved 2019-06-05.
- ↑ Corvin, Aiden; Sullivan, Patrick F. (May 2016). "What Next in Schizophrenia Genetics for the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium?". Schizophrenia Bulletin. 42 (3): 538–541. doi:10.1093/schbul/sbw014. ISSN 0586-7614. PMC 4838114 . PMID 26994396.
- 1 2 O'Donovan, Michael C. (October 2015). "What have we learned from the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium". World Psychiatry. 14 (3): 291–293. doi:10.1002/wps.20270. ISSN 1723-8617. PMC 4592644 . PMID 26407777.
- ↑ "New Genetic Risk Factors Discovered for Alzheimer's Disease". UNC Health Care (Press release). 2019-01-07. Retrieved 2019-06-05.
- 1 2 Logue, Mark W.; Amstadter, Ananda B.; Baker, Dewleen G.; Duncan, Laramie; Koenen, Karestan C.; Liberzon, Israel; Miller, Mark W.; Morey, Rajendra A.; Nievergelt, Caroline M. (September 2015). "The Psychiatric Genomics Consortium Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Workgroup: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Enters the Age of Large-Scale Genomic Collaboration". Neuropsychopharmacology. 40 (10): 2287–2297. doi:10.1038/npp.2015.118. ISSN 1740-634X. PMC 4538342 . PMID 25904361.