Panic Disorder May Have Genetic Origins

According to a new scientific study, it would appear that there is a 40 percent chance that panic disorders are inherited from parents. That is to say, experts believe they may have a genetic origin.

The findings are very interesting, considering that this type of condition was usually believed to be subjective, which would naturally preclude any sort of transmission over generations.

At this point, the mechanisms through which genes contribute to a person developing panic disorders is unclear, but experts say that they are already investigating the matter in detail. The new study was carried out on twins.

This helped the experts tease out genetic causes from a host of other factors that may have influenced the onset of these conditions. What is known for sure right now is that the impact each genetic variation has on the overall outcome is quite small.

Specialists believe that a cocktail of genetic alterations and variations must be involved in causing the condition. However, they have yet to identify which genes are responsible for this.

One key factor in panic disorders, the new research determined, could be microRNA (miRNA), a specialized type of ribonucleic acid. The molecule acts like a chemical switch, which controls the way groups of genes function in carefully-choreographed patterns.

The basic molecule of life, DNA, is directly responsible for producing RNA, whereas the latter produces proteins in turn. But miRNA, which are basically very small snippets of RNA, can connect to DNA, and influence the way genes are expressed overall.

In the investigation, scientists discovered four types of miRNA that may contribute to the onset of panic disorders. Studies were conducted on twins from Spain, Finland and Estonia.

“These data provide important new evidence that variation in genes coding for miRNA may coordinate the involvement of a number of risk genes and thereby contribute to the development of panic disorder,” explains Dr. John Krystal.

The expert is the Editor of Biological Psychiatry, the journal that published the new discoveries in its latest issue, PsychCentral reports.

Twins are often used for such studies, due to their closely-related (or even identical) genetic material. This provides researchers with a frame of reference when assessing the impact of other influencing factors on a selected topic, in this case panic disorders.