Behavior and Molecular Genetic Approaches to Comorbidity

Genetic approaches to human behavior.

Tremendous progress in the field of human genetics has made a major impact over the last two decades into our understanding of many Mendelian disorders affecting humans. It is much more difficult to approach the genetics of complex disorders and is particularly challenging in the case of dissecting genetics of the wide range of behavioral variation in the general population. Knowledge of the bi...

Modern molecular genetic approaches to psychiatric disease.

Major advances in molecular genetics over the last 15 years have made it possible to identify the genes responsible for human diseases using purely genetic approaches that do not require knowledge about disease pathophysiology. Many successes have been achieved for single gene disorders and methods are being adapted and refined for complex diseases. The main strategies include linkage and assoc...

Molecular genetic approaches to the study of primate behavior, social organization, and reproduction.

In the past several decades, the development of novel molecular techniques and the advent of noninvasive DNA sampling, coupled with the ease and speed with which molecular analyses can now be performed, have made it possible for primatologists to directly examine the fitness effects of individual behavior and to explore how variation in behavior and social systems influences primate population ...

Antisocial behavior and alcoholism: a behavioral genetic perspective on comorbidity.

Similar to many domains in the psychopathology literature, overlap and covariation between antisocial behavior (ASB) and alcohol dependence (AD) are oft documented but little understood. Although the relation between ASB and AD is reliably found and of substantial magnitude, it is not possible given the extant research to discriminate among alternative causal models that could give rise to this...

Familiality, comorbidity and molecular genetic factors in major depressive disorder