Bipolar Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Bipolar, including details on bipolar disorder, symptoms, treatment, depression, medication.

Bipolar 1 disorder is not associated with the RGS4, PRODH, COMT and GRK3 genes.

Prata DP, Breen G, Munro J, Sinclair M, Osborne S, Li T, Kerwin R, St Clair D, Collier DA

Although current psychiatric nosology separates bipolar disorder and schizophrenia into non-overlapping categories, there is growing evidence of a partial aetiological overlap between them from linkage, genetic epidemiology and molecular genetics studies. Thus, it is important to determine whether genes implicated in the aetiology of schizophrenia play a role in bipolar disorder, and vice versa. In this study we investigated a total of 15 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), and all possible haplotypes, of genes that have been previously implicated in schizophrenia or bipolar disorder - RGS4, PRODH, COMT and GRK3 - in a sample of 213 cases with bipolar affective disorder type 1 and 197 controls from Scotland. We analysed the polymorphisms allele-wise, genotype-wise and, for each gene, haplotype-wise but obtained no result that reached nominal significance (p<0.05) for an association with the disease status. In conclusion, we could not find evidence of association between RGS4, PRODH, COMT and GRK3 genes and bipolar affective disorder 1 in the Scottish population.

Published 19 November 2006 in Psychiatr Genet, 16(6): 229-30.
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