Past research has shown the impact of commonly occurring genetic variants on a person’s risk of developing schizophrenia. This new study focused instead on rare coding mutations that affect protein function. It found that patients with schizophrenia have a higher-than-normal share of these mutations.
“While we cannot point to specific mutations that play a causal role in schizophrenia, we show that schizophrenia patients collectively have more of these mutations than unaffected individuals,” said Loes Olde Loohuis, the study’s first author and a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA’s Center for Neurobehavioral Genetics. The center is part of the university’s Jane and Terry Semel Institute for Neuroscience & Human Behavior.
The findings are reported in the July 15 edition of Nature Communications.
See the full story here:
1 Like
The essence of my post at Brain abnormalities in people with schizophrenia identified, actually. I think you were gone.
1 Like
The UCLA study hit my computer this morning. (See http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/150702/ncomms8501/full/ncomms8501.html.)
Owing to three different indirect connections to the folks just down the freeway from me, I have the highest regard for what goes on at the Semel Institute, but I will once again squawk about the slanted interpretations of any research that asserts – or seems to assert – a wholly (or even largely) dominant role for nature (vs. nurture) in the etiology of sz or any other psychiatric disorder.
I see too many example of just plain bad science, as well as bad interpretation thereof, to sit still for this without squirming like a three-year-old.
One of these also hit my computer this a.m.; see http://www.drugandalcoholdependence.com/article/S0376-8716(15)00306-3/abstract. In this particular piece of junk, it was asserted that “Prenatal cocaine exposure (PCE) is associated with increased risk for externalizing behavior problems; childhood externalizing behavior problems are linked with subsequent early sexual behavior.”
My forehead slammed immediately onto my desk (figuratively, anyway) when I saw no statements whatsoever about the obvious confounds involving the interaction of drug-soaked mothers with the only-partially completed brains of their late-term fetuses, then neonates, then infants, then toddlers, then, then and then. (See as much of this as I have in 28 years of looking at drug-addicted mamas and their tortured kiddies, and you may come to a different conclusion than the folks at CWU.)
In whatever event, one has to be very cautious about taking either the scientists or those who describe their (supposed) “science” too seriously.
Because things like Prozac and Paxil often turn up as a direct result. (One may wish to dig about a bit to see the additional piling on about those two, research-driven, pharmaceutical fuck-ups in this week’s medical media.)
1 Like