Susceptibility Genes Found for Bipolar Syndrome

Researchers have found that members of families with a history of psychotic bipolar disorder, a severe manic-depressive illness characterized by such psychotic symptoms as hallucinations and delusions, may carry susceptibility genes for the syndrome on chromosomal regions 13q31 and 22q12. These findings were reported in the April 2003, issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry.

Investigators from Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, MD, USA) performed gene analysis studies on members of 65 families with bipolar disorder. They found ten families in which three or more members had psychotic bipolar disorder showing strong genetic linkage to specific regions on chromosomes 13 and 22. These results differed significantly from those for the entire study group of 65 families, which showed little or no linkage evidence in these two regions.

"These results confirmed our expectation that genes for the psychotic form of bipolar disorder are likely to be found in the same regions that show linkage to both bipolar disorder as a whole and to schizophrenia,” explained first author Dr. James Potash, assistant professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University. "Finding a gene for bipolar disorder is like finding a needle in a haystack, but by focusing our search on families with a distinctive form of the illness we were able to pinpoint a region of the genome where disease genes are likely to be found.”



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