First strong genetic links to depression identified

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Jonathan Flint knew the odds of finding genetic sequences linked to depression were slim: a study of 9,000 people with major depressive disorder had come up empty, and Flint had heard rumours that a follow-up analysis of 17,000 people had also met with disappointment. “I thought, ‘There’s no way,’” says the geneticist from the University of Oxford, UK, whose study had by that point analysed only 5,303 people with depression.

Flint has proved himself wrong. In Nature, his team reports the first two genetic markers reproducibly linked to major depressive disorder, one of the leading causes of disability globally.

Flint and Kenneth Kendler, a psychiatrist at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond decided to do the study in China, because of its large population and because depression is believed to be under-diagnosed there. In that climate, Flint reasoned, those who are diagnosed are likely to share a severe form of the disorder. To reduce the variability further, his team also limited the study to women of Han Chinese ethnicity.

The analysis yielded two genetic sequences that seemed to be linked to depression: one in a stretch of DNA that codes for an enzyme whose function is not fully understood, and the other next to the gene SIRT1, which is important for energy-producing cell structures called mitochondria.

Flint’s success may energize that search, says Patrick Sullivan, a psychiatric geneticist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “We’ve had to learn not to listen a lot to our critics,” he says. “If we listened to people telling us that what we’re doing is stupid, we would have stopped years ago.”

The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. Read full, original post: First robust genetic links to depression emerge

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