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See the publication for a full list of funding for this research. The study is funded in part by the Chapman Perelman Foundation and the National Institute of Mental Health. They are affiliated with the following institutions: Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute at Texas Children’s Hospital, Columbia University Irving Medical Center, New York State Psychiatric Institute and Waypoint Bio. “We hope that this research brings light and attention to these patients who are often left out of cutting-edge research because of the severity of their condition,” Zoghbi said. Zoghbi says this study also may lay the groundwork for future research on therapeutics to target genetic mutations associated with schizophrenia. Identifying rare variant risk factors in individuals with severe schizophrenia could lead to better understanding of prognosis and treatment resistance and to more opportunities for genetic counseling for families impacted by this disease.
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“We think that this method of study could be a new paradigm for trying to understand how to enrich a genetic signal in a psychiatric disorder by focusing on individuals who are very severely affected by the disease,” said Zoghbi, who also is chief of psychiatric genetics in the Menninger Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Baylor. The severe schizophrenia group also had a higher variant burden in gens previously associated with schizophrenia than the group with typical schizophrenia. More than 48 percent of individuals with extremely treatment-resistant schizophrenia carried at least one of the rare, damaging variants, versus approximately 30 percent of those with typical schizophrenia and 25 percent of the control group. They conducted genetic sequencing and examined the burden of rare, damaging variants impacting gene function in three groups: people with severe schizophrenia, people with typical schizophrenia and a control group of healthy individuals.
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Zoghbi and his team examined mutations across a set of “intolerant” genes, which are infrequently mutated in the healthy, general population. “The hypothesis is that these patients might have a greater prevalence of disease-causing mutations because they have such a severe form of the illness, and that’s what we ended up seeing,” said Zoghbi, corresponding author of the study and Beth K. For this study, the researchers focused on the extreme end of that spectrum-a group of 112 patients with severe, extremely treatment-resistant schizophrenia who have required long-term hospitalization in New York State inpatient facilities. Schizophrenia patients have a diverse spectrum of observable symptoms.
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Anthony Zoghbi, now assistant professor of molecular and human genetics and psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Baylor College of Medicine.
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The research was conducted at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and led by Dr. HOUSTON, TX - New research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that examining genetic mutations in individuals with severe schizophrenia can improve the ability to detect disease-associated rare genetic variants. Share Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Email
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