Researchers have found that eight different mental disorders may share common genetic mechanisms.
This is reported by Science alert, UNN.
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Specifically, researchers have found that eight different disorders share a common genetic basis. The new study focused on some of these common genetic variants to understand their properties.
The proteins produced by these genes are also closely related to other proteins. Changes in these proteins, in particular, can propagate through the network, potentially causing widespread effects in the brain.
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In 2019, an international team of researchers identified 109 genes that are linked in various combinations to eight different mental disorders, including autism, ADHD, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, Tourette's syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and anorexia.
This may explain why so many of these conditions manifest similar symptoms or appear together, like the link between autism and ADHD. Up to 70% of people who have one have the other, and they often run in the same families.
Each of these eight conditions also has genetic differences that are unique to each of them, so Vaughan and his team compared the unique genes to those shared by these disorders.
They took almost 18,000 variations of common and unique genes involved in this process and put them into the progenitor cells that will become our neurons to see how they might affect gene expression in these cells during human development.
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This allowed the researchers to identify 683 genetic variants that affect gene regulation and study them in more detail in developing mouse neurons.
Genetic variants that underlie several seemingly unrelated traits, or in this case, conditions, are called pleiotropic. Pleiotropic variants have been implicated in many more protein-protein interactions than gene variants unique to certain psychological conditions, and they have been active in more types of brain cells.
Pleiotropic variants have also been implicated in regulatory mechanisms that affect several stages of brain development. The ability of these genes to influence cascades and networks of processes, such as gene regulation, may explain why the same variants can contribute to different conditions.
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“Pleiotropy has traditionally been considered a problem because it makes it difficult to classify mental disorders,” says Vaughn.
“However, if we can understand the genetic basis of pleiotropy, it may enable us to develop treatments that target these common genetic factors, which could then help treat multiple mental disorders with general therapy.