P McGuffin

..The first susceptibility genes involved in major psychiatric disorders have been identified and more will soon follow with the exploitation of emerging technologies that allow whole genome association studies...

..This study presents the method and socio-demographic details of the first 470 affected sibling pairs recruited from 8 different sites in Europe and the United States of America...

..The aim of this study was to design a short and practical screening tool to identify migraine for clinical and research purposes...

..To discuss the impact of Watson and Crick's double helix discovery on the field of psychiatry...

..Both the 12q and the 15q findings remained significant at genome-wide level when the data from the present study and the previous reports were combined...

..There has been little use of genetic model fitting and no analyses to explore the etiological overlap with unipolar depression (UPD)...

..Further progress is likely to come from candidate gene and linkage disequilibrium studies that are capable of detecting multiple genes of small effect...

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..Symptom dimensions have not yet been comprehensively tested as predictors of the substantial heterogeneity in outcomes of antidepressant treatment in major depressive disorder...

..The functional implications of this effect are discussed...

..In the combined sample of 2,170 MDD cases and 1,810 controls, there were positive findings in the Nitric Oxide Synthase 2A (NOS2A) gene both using single SNP analysis and haplotype analysis...

..Suicidal ideation was significantly associated with high neuroticism and psychoticism scores and severe threatening life events...

..Gene-environment interactions including life events may therefore be important not only in the aetiology of depression, but also in predicting response to antidepressant medication...

..We explore alternative categorization of outcome by naturally occurring trajectories of symptom change...

..This was the case in the sample as a whole, and when females and males were considered separately. Our findings suggest that the MTHFR C677T polymorphism is not involved in the etiology of clinically significant recurrent MDD...

..We found no single marker or haplotype associations that withstood correction for multiple testing. Our findings do not provide evidence that NRG1 plays a role in MDD or that this gene explains part of the genetic overlap with BPD...

..Limited power precludes definitive conclusions and replication in larger sample is warranted...

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..This effect requires replication and a test of whether it is specific to serotonin-reuptake inhibiting (SRI) antidepressants...

..Instead we are using the same design to screen markers such as cSNPs and SNPs in regulatory regions that are likely to include functional polymorphisms in which the marker can be presumed to be the QTL...

..This finding suggests that FTO is involved in the mechanism underlying the association between mood disorders and obesity...

..Implications for our understanding of the relationship between migraine and depression are discussed...

..This may suggest that the absence of deletion CNVs, especially in genes, is associated with resilience to recurrent depression...

..The GWAS approach is also beginning to be applied in the search for genes that underlie suicidal ideation and behaviour...

..We conclude that there is no evidence of a common major gene for bipolar affective disorder at Xq25-q27 in our set of families...

..CONCLUSIONS: The SSQ measures a familial personality trait and depression is associated with lower scores. Although high sensation-seeking is associated with a higher rate of life events, these carry little threat...

..The objective of this study was to investigate the effect of positive mood induction on emotional processing in euthymic individuals with bipolar disorder (BD) and controls...

..These systematic relationships between method and results should be followed up to specify causal mechanisms leading to depression...

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..We found no evidence to support this association...

..Therefore, we sought to explore the prevalence of more specific adverse childhood experiences amongst those with and without psychotic disorders using detailed assessments in a large epidemiological case-control sample (AESOP)...

..The familiality of the psychomotor poverty, disorganisation, and manic dimensions supports their use in the delineation of homogeneous subsets for genetic studies...

..Reasons for the difficulty in obtaining consistent results and possible strategies for overcoming them are discussed. Am. J. Med. Genet. (Semin. Med. Genet.) 97:23-44, 2000...

..These effects may underlie the vulnerability to mood and anxiety disorders potentially triggered by socially salient, emotional cues in individuals with the S allele of 5-HTTLPR...

..In this study we examined and integrated the psychometric properties of three commonly used rating scales...

..There has now been an explosion of interest in this field and research progress, including linkage and association studies, whole genome genotyping, copy number variants and epigenetics is reviewed here...

..These were combined in a variety of permutations...

..In this study, there was no evidence of a genetic effect for 5HTTLPR or BDNF Val66Met on hippocampal morphology in either healthy individuals or MDD patients despite the relatively large sample sizes and sensitive methodology...

..Further studies will be needed to confirm or refute the observed associations and their generalisability to other samples...

..To present an overview on current progress and future directions in psychiatric genetics...

..Appropriate modelling of life events in linkage and association analyses should help to identify QTLs for depression and anxiety...

..This is necessary if psychiatric diagnoses are ultimately going to be refined and validated against biological criteria...

..However, it is not clear whether maternal smoking during pregnancy is independently associated with antisocial behaviour or whether the association arises because antisocial behaviour and ADHD covary...

..The functional significance of this result and the potential biochemical mechanisms responsible for this effect are discussed...

..Biological and behavioural intermediate phenotypes are yet to be exploited to understand the mechanisms underlying the G x E...

..In conclusion, care must be taken when choosing reference transcripts for analysis in qPCR. For in-vitro pharmacological studies, it should not be assumed that 'housekeeping' genes are stable...

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..These data provide the first detailed illustration of the genetic relationship between these common inflammatory bowel diseases...

..Here we compare the clinical profile of major depression for men and women from a sample of almost 600 well-characterized individuals with recurrent major depressive disorder (MDD)...

..These latter findings may result from interpersonal cognitions in young children, reflecting life experiences as opposed to trait-like cognitive biases...

..Together, these routes accounted for approximately 13% of total phenotypic variance in depressive symptoms. Theoretical and analytical implications of these results are discussed in the context of several design-related caveats...

..38, P=0.004) and appetite gain (exp(B)=2.19, P<0.001). Sex significantly modifies clinical features of depression and an earlier onset of depression and atypical depressive symptoms occur more frequently in women...

..This paper presents the rationale for the study, describes its context, and the methods for twin ascertainment and data collection...

..Our results do not support initial interest in utilising 5HTTLPR genotypes in combination with neuroticism ratings for predicting outcome in smoking cessation clinical settings...

..Particularly, the institution of operational diagnoses along with the contentious issues of subdividing major depressive disorder and its characterisation on a dimensional as opposed to a categorical scale...

..Further work is needed to examine these phenotype issues...

..None of the dimensions were significant predictors of psychosis risk in co-twins. We conclude that, of the dimensions analyzed, the narrow disorganized dimension shows most promise as a phenotype for molecular genetic research...

..Few studies have examined the rates of physical disorders in those with recurrent depression...

..On the 200th birthday of psychiatry, it is fitting to reconsider the specialty's core values and renew efforts to use psychiatric skills for the maximum benefit of patients...

..Such features should alert a clinician to a possible bipolar course. This is important because optimal management is not the same for bipolar and unipolar depression...

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..Few studies have examined whether attributional style (an individual's explanation of why events happen) is a genetically influenced vulnerability factor for depression...

..The data also support a role for genetic influence on threat interpretations, which may mediate responses to stress...

..Our results suggest a partial genetic overlap with a specific genetic effect contributing to the variance of aggressive ASB and a stronger genetic effect on aggression in females than in males...

..The influences on these individual differences have not previously been examined in children and adolescents using multiple raters in a genetically informative design...

..However, there is a lack of studies using a genetically informative design combined with several different informants and different settings...

..A dimensional rather than a categorical approach to depressive phenotype definition may be more useful for identification of susceptibility genes...

..Each phenotype was subject to its own environmental influences that were not shared...

..Experiencing a high rate of non-severe events may be associated with resilience to becoming depressed in the face of a threatening event...

..However, the literature is not entirely consistent in this respect and existing longitudinal twin studies have examined changes within adolescence only...

..A sib-pair method has been used to examine the familiality of the 7 scales of the Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI) and whether this could be related to the genetic vulnerability to develop depression...

..3, and proline dehydrogenase, which is a gene that maps to chromosome 22q11. In addition, there is renewed interest in a fifth gene, catechol-O-methyltransferase, also on chromosome 22q11...

..These clinical variables may be useful for refining phenotypic definitions of schizophrenia in molecular genetic studies...

..This article will discuss techniques that have been used in psychiatric genetics, and how they have advanced our understanding of complex behaviour...

..DNA will revolutionize psychological research and treatment during the coming decades...

..CONCLUSIONS: Neither extraversion nor neuroticism measures trait vulnerability to depression, and neuroticism scores mainly reflect symptoms of depression...

..The familiality of these clinical characteristics supports their use in the delineation of homogeneous subsets for future genetic studies...

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..This has implications for study designs aiming to find genes that contribute to the disorder...

..2) around 64 cM (43-70 cM) near marker D1S2892 and another on chromosome 6p (LOD 2.7) around 47 cM (34-63 cM) near marker D6S1610. Further exploratory sex-specific analyses suggested that these QTLs might have sex-limited effects...

..A range of considerably larger, epidemiologically rigorous studies is required, but the uncommonness and other features of the disorder put strong limitations on the prospects for ascertaining adequate samples...

..This pilot study evaluates the Go task in a reward paradigm as a method for inducing a happy mood state and compares the response of euthymic bipolar subjects and healthy controls...

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..They suggest that a postnatal onset definition of within 6-8 weeks of delivery may be optimal in studies of the triggering of depressive illness by childbirth...

..Associations between sleep and internalizing problems are complex and poorly understood. To better understand these covarying difficulties, genetic and environmental influences were estimated by using a twin design...

..Molecular genetic studies of bipolar affective disorder are beginning to show some positive and reproducible findings. The most relevant of these will be reviewed...

..The regions identified underscore the importance of pathways influencing pancreatic beta cell development and function in the etiology of type 2 diabetes...

..Abnormalities of cognitive style in bipolar disorder are of both clinical and theoretical importance...

..The Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre was established by the Medical Research Council, in partnership with the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, in 1994...

..The location of the polymorphism in the 5'regulatory region of the DRD4 gene and the fact that it consists of potential transcription factor binding sites suggest that it might confer differential transcriptional activity of the alleles...

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..CONCLUSIONS: Social functioning as measured by SASS is predicted by extraversion and severity of depression. Personality traits should be taken into account when assessing social functioning in depression...

..CONCLUSIONS: These results indicate that the nuclear syndrome shows substantial heritability, although this is slightly lower than that for schizophrenia as defined by the DSM and ICD systems...

..It was concluded that a risk genotype conferring susceptibility to family dysfunction is responsible for most of the variance in antisocial symptoms in childhood and adolescence...