Researchers ID Genes That May Determine Mental Illness
Genes that increase or reduce the risk of certain mental illnesses and Alzheimer’s disease have been identified by an international team of scientists.
The researchers said they also pinpointed a number of genes that may explain individual differences in brain size and intelligence.
“We searched for two things in this study,” senior author Paul Thompson, a professor of neurology at the University of California, Los Angeles David Geffen School of Medicine and a member of UCLA’s Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, said in a university news release.
“We hunted for genes that increase your risk for a single disease that your children can inherit. We also looked for factors that cause tissue atrophy and reduce brain size, which is a biological marker for hereditary disorders like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, Alzheimer’s disease and dementia,” he explained.
The researchers said this was the largest-ever brain study to date, according to the release.
The team of more than 200 scientists at 100 institutions worldwide measured the size of the brain and its memory centers in thousands of MRI images from more than 21,100 healthy people and screened the participants’ DNA at the same time.
In people with smaller brains, the researchers found a consistent relationship between subtle differences in the genetic code and smaller memory centers. They also found that the same genes affected the brain in the same ways in people in different populations.