Bipolar Disorder May Be Linked to Schizophrenia

A large-scale international cooperation of 250 scientists from 20 countries has recently determined that a number of specific genetic variations appear to be present in patients suffering from a wide range of mental illnesses. This connects schizophrenia to bipolar disorder, but more is needed on this issue.

Over the course of several years, the research team studied mutations in a sample population of 50,000 adults, focusing mostly on how these variations influenced the link between schizophrenia and BPD. At the end of the investigation, they were able to establish whether such a link indeed exists.

Top geneticists with the group were able to deepen our knowledge of 5 DNA regions known to be involved with underlying this connection. Furthermore, they were able to discover 6 new mutations that appeared to play a similar role as well.

These discoveries are backed up by molecular evidence the team reports in two scientific papers, published in the latest issue of the top journal nature Genetics. The collaboration was called the Psychiatric Genome-Wide Association Study Consortium, PsychCentral reports.

Now that scientists know more about the mechanisms of mental disorders, they can proceed towards developing new courses of treatment. The end goal here is to find out how to mitigate – or even erase – the effects of these conditions, which are currently chronic, severe and debilitating.

“This is the largest study of its kind by far,” principal investigator Patrick F. Sullivan, MD, explains. The expert holds an appointment with the University of North Carolina (UNC) School of Medicine.

The survey identified “strong evidence for seven different places in the human genome, five of which were new and two previously implicated, that contain DNA changes that are significantly associated with schizophrenia,” the expert says.

When the group carried out a joint schizophrenia/BPD analysis, it learned that three new loci are involved in both diseases. “This tells us that these disorders, which many of us have considered to be separate things, actually share fundamental similarity,” the team leader adds.

The international collaboration is not interested in these two mental illnesses exclusively. The researchers are also working to connect multiple disorders together, by analyzing a larger sample of 90,000 individuals.

Understanding the genetic foundations of mental illnesses is a very challenging, but potentially very rewarding avenue of research, holding great promise for the creation of efficient treatments against this type of conditions.