MENTAL HLTH GENES

Having the genes would raise a person’s risk of all these disorders.

The genes that contribute to the development of five common mental disorder have been uncovered by new research.

Several sets of genes contribute to major depression, bipolar disorder, ADHD, autism spectrum disorder, and schizophrenia, the analysis of 421,700 people revealed.

The results suggest that some genes are involved in a wide range of mental illnesses.

Having the genes would raise a person’s risk of all five disorders.

They also suggest that the same biological mechanisms are involved in all five mental illnesses.

Professor Christel Middeldorp, study co-author, said:

“Before this analysis, we knew a lot of psychiatric disorders were related to each other due to their hereditary nature.

We often see multiple family members with mental illness in one family, but not necessarily with the same disorder.

We investigated if specific sets of genes were involved in the development of multiple disorders, which genes are not only related to say, ADHD, but also to the other four psychiatric disorders.

These are genes that play a role in the same biological pathway or are active in the same tissue type.

Genes that are highly expressed in the brain were shown to affect the different disorders, and some genes were related to all the illnesses we studied.

It shows that there is a common set of genes that increase your risk for all five disorders.”

The results come from an analysis of 159,219 people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, autism spectrum disorder, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.

They were compared with 262,481 healthy controls.

The results showed that nineteen sets of genes were significantly associated with the five psychiatric disorders.

Dr Anke Hammerschlag, the study’s first author, said:

“We found that there are shared biological mechanisms acting across disorders that all point to functions in brain cells.

The synapse plays a vital role as this is the connection point between brain cells where the cells communicate with each other.

We also found that genes especially active in the brain are important, while genes active in other tissues do not play a role.”