Rare Gene Deletion Tied To Psychiatric Disease And Obesity

Featured Article Academic Journal Main Category: Psychology / Psychiatry Also Included In: Obesity / Weight Loss / Fitness;Anxiety / Stress;Genetics Article Date: 09 Oct 2012 - 14:00 PDT

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In their paper, Carl Ernst, a professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the Faculty of Medicine of McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, and colleagues, suggest deletion of BDNF, a nervous system growth factor that is important for brain development, leads to major depression, anxiety and obesity.

They are confident they have found a molecular pathway that plays a key role in psychopathology.

Ernst, who is also a researcher at the Douglas Mental Health University Institute (affiliated to McGill), says scientists have been scouring the genome to find regions in our DNA that may tell us something about the genetic origins of psychiatric disorders.

For some time, thanks to animal studies, it has been proposed that BDNF plays several roles in the brain, but no study has yet shown what happens when it is missing from the genome.

In this study, the participants were 35,000 people referred for genetic screening, and over 30,000 controls, in Canada, Europe and the US.

From the genetic screening, five people (including three children) tested positive for BDNF deletions. All five were obese and had mild to moderate intellectual impairment, plus a mood disorder, which in the children comprised anxiety disorder, aggressive disorder, or attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and in the older subjects comprised anxiety or major depressive disorder.

As they got older, these subject gradually put on weight, which the researchers suggest means obesity happens slowly when it is due to BDNF deletion.

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Rare Gene Deletion Tied To Psychiatric Disease And Obesity