Schizophrenia and bipolar disorder originate from some common vulnerability

Wednesday, July 1, 2009 - 12:28 in Biology & Nature

An international team has discovered that many common genetic variants contribute to a person's risk of schizophrenia and explain at least a third of the risk of inheriting the disease, providing the first molecular evidence that this form of genetic variation is involved in schizophrenia. The researchers also found that many of these DNA variations also are involved in bipolar disorder but not in several non-psychiatric diseases. The findings, published in the current issue of Nature, represent a new way of thinking about the genetics of psychiatric diseases, which seem to involve not only rare variants but also a significant number of common ones as well...

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