David Steele considers the implications of a Swedish population registry study, which finds that people with eating disorders and their close relations are at increased risk for attempting and/or completing suicide.
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Marcus Munafò looks at the mounting evidence about smoking and risk of schizophrenia, including a new case-control study that provides clear evidence of a prospective association between cigarette smoking and a subsequent diagnosis of schizophrenia.
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Genome-wide association studies have proved extremely successful in identifying reliable genetic associations with a number of disease outcomes, but until now studies of psychiatric outcomes have lagged behind. This latest schizophrenia study is therefore an important advance.
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Linking brain scans with genetic information offers a powerful way to further our understanding of how the brain works, but to do this properly many researchers from around the world need to collaborate. Fortunately, the ENIGMA Consortium are leading the way in this emerging field of imaging genomics.
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With the background of 11% of total United States government spending for disability support in 2006, the authors from Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School highlight the financial and social imperatives to improve services for people with learning disabilities. They remind us that most of the current focus on research has been on environmental [read the full story…]
Uncovering the genetic component to common disease has been challenging. Whilst we now have more reliable heritability estimates (the proportion of susceptibility to disease which is accounted for by genetics), we are far from finding all genetic variants contributing to heritability. That is to say that if a disease is 80% heritable, we may have [read the full story…]
It has long been established that psychiatric disorders have a genetic component. In the early days of genetic research, twin and family studies were used to estimate heritability (the proportion of variance explained by genetic factors). The Psychiatric Genetics Consortium has recently published a paper in Nature Genetics to assess the heritability and co-inheritability (relationship between [read the full story…]
When trying to understand more about about mental health problems one of the big questions is: are the results of a study due to how the person is currently feeling or are the results due to a predisposition to how they are feeling now? While often the answer will be a bit of both, researchers [read the full story…]
Symptoms associated with schizophrenia are often classified into two categories. The classical indicators such as hallucinations, delusions and thought disorder make up the ‘positive’ category whilst apathy and problems with concentration are ‘negative’ symptoms. These negative symptoms have previously been linked to decreased folate levels (Goff et al. 2004) and there is some evidence that [read the full story…]
One of the first lectures I attended at Medical School was an introduction to the “nature vs. nurture” debate. I recall the general consensus was a bit of both, however it wasn’t until many years later and well into my public health career that I began to see the value of this perspective in improving [read the full story…]
