New research suggested a possible genetic target for susceptibility to schizophrenia.
Professor Mike Owen, Director of the MRC Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics and the Neuroscience and Mental Health Research Institute, Cardiff University, said:
“These findings from two independent Chinese studies add some more pieces to the very large jigsaw puzzle that is schizophrenia genetics. They identify common genetic variants at four different chromosomal locations that increase risk, each by a small amount. It is likely that individual risk is conferred by many hundreds of such variants, over 20 of which have been identified to date, and the challenge for geneticists is to identify enough of these to implicate the key brain processes that underlie the disorder. This will require further analyses of these findings and their integration with previous work and the results of future studies.
“The take home message for now is that this type of genetic study can successfully identify schizophrenia genes and we can expect the even larger studies currently being undertaken to generate more of the missing pieces.
“Schizophrenia is a severe psychiatric disorder that will affect approximately 1% of the population. We know very little about its causes, apart from the fact that genes appear to play an important role, and very little about the abnormalities in brain function that underlie the symptoms. It imposes considerable burdens on sufferers, their families and society, and there is a pressing need for new and more effective therapies.”
‘Common variants on 8p12 and 1q24.2 confer risk of schizophrenia’ by Shi et al and ‘Genome wide association study identifies a susceptibility locus for schizophrenia in Han Chinese at 11p11.2’ by Yu et al were both published in Nature Genetics on Sunday 30 October.