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Genetics of affective (mood) disorders.

Craddock N, Forty L

Department of Psychological Medicine, The Henry Wellcome Building for Biomedical Research in Wales, Wales School of Medicine, Cardiff University, Heath Park, Cardiff, UK. craddockn@cardiff.ac.uk

The enormous public health importance of mood disorders, when considered alongside their substantial heritabilities, has stimulated much work, predominantly in bipolar disorder but increasingly in unipolar depression, aimed at identifying susceptibility genes using both positional and functional molecular genetic approaches. Several regions of interest have emerged in linkage studies and, recently, evidence implicating specific genes has been reported; the best supported include BDNF and DAOA but further replications are required and phenotypic relationships and biological mechanisms need investigation. The complexity of psychiatric phenotypes is demonstrated by (a) the evidence accumulating for an overlap in genetic susceptibility across the traditional classification systems that divide disorders into schizophrenia and mood disorders, and (b) evidence suggestive of gene-environment interactions.

Published 24 May 2006 in Eur J Hum Genet, 14(6): 660-8.
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