Discuss Bipolar
Blog to discuss being Bipolar
None of several polymorphisms of a gene in chromosome 12 previously linked to bipolar disorders are involved in susceptibility to mood disorders, the results of a UK study indicate.
Chromosomal region 12q24 has been implicated in both bipolar disorder and unipolar mood disorder in linkage studies, and the gene P2RX7, which is located within this chromosomal region, has been suggested as a susceptibility gene for bipolar disorder and unipolar depression.
To investigate further, Elaine Green, from the University of Wales College of Medicine in Cardiff, and colleagues studied 687 bipolar I disorder patients, 1036 unipolar recurrent major depression patients, and 1204 healthy controls.
All participants were genotyped for single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) of the P2RX7 gene, including the non-synonymous (missense) SNP rs2230912. This results in amino-acid polymorphism Q460R, which has previously been suggested to be pathologically relevant in mood disorders.
Writing in the American Journal of Medical Genetics Part B Neuropsychiatric Genetics, the team reports that none of the polymorphisms studied had significant allelic or genotypic association with bipolar disorder compared with controls, with unipolar depression compared with controls, or with combined mood disorder compared with controls.
Furthermore, sequencing of two families with chromosome 12-linked bipolar disorder and Darier’s disease did not reveal any rare variants that could explain the previously observed linkage.
The team concludes: “We have found no evidence that the non-synonymous SNP rs2230912 influences susceptibility to mood disorder in our study population…
“Nonetheless it remains possible that variation within parts of the gene that were not well tagged within the current study may influence risk for mood disorder or that the effect in the population we studied was too small to be detected in our sample.”
MedWire (www.medwire-news.md) is an independent clinical news service provided by Current Medicine Group, a trading division of Springer Healthcare Limited. © Springer Healthcare Ltd; 2009
No Comments »
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL
Leave a comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.