Major brain disorders linked to one gene

摘要

Schizophrenia, autism and intellectual disability may all share a common genetic pathway. Nelson Freimer at the University of California, Los Angeles, and colleagues studied an isolated community in Finland where schizophrenia and other neurological disorders are unusually common, possibly due to unavoidable inbreeding. His team identified that 18 of 173 people from the community lacked a group of genes. Just one of 1586 samples from people throughout Finland were missing the same genes. Tests revealed that these deletions are more common in people with schizophrenia or cognitive impairments.