objective: bipolar i disorder is a common disorder with a complex etiology. a genetic approach is gaining increasing importance in this disorder. the dysbindin gene, located at 6p22.3 is considered a susceptibility gene for schizophrenia. certain genotypes of dysbindin are thought to be associated with other psychoses such as bipolar disorders. this study intends to assess the association in pr...

Determining the genetic influences on cognitive ability in old age and in cognitive ageing are important areas of research in an increasingly ageing society. Heritability studies indicate that genetic variants strongly influence cognitive ability differences throughout the lifespan, including in old age. To date, however, only the genes encoding apolipoprotein E (APOE) and possibly catechol-O-m...

BACKGROUND/AIMS Meta-analysis of genetic association studies is a useful approach when individual investigations do not yield studywise significant results but the evidence across studies is modest and homogeneous. Current meta-analysis methods account for heterogeneity by down-weighting studies as a function of between-study variance. We contend that current approaches may obscure interesting ...

Schizophrenia is a major psychiatric disorder that afflicts about 1% of the world's population, falling into the top 10 medical disorders causing disability. Existing therapeutic strategies have had limited success on cognitive impairment and long-term disability and are burdened by side effects. Although new antipsychotic medications have been launched in the past decades, there has been a gen...

Schizophrenia poses an evolutionary-genetic paradox because it exhibits strongly negative fitness effects and high heritability, yet it persists at a prevalence of approximately 1% across all human cultures. Recent theory has proposed a resolution: that genetic liability to schizophrenia has evolved as a secondary consequence of selection for human cognitive traits. This hypothesis predicts tha...

Throughout an organism's early development, variations in physiology and behaviours may have long lasting consequences on individual life histories. While a large part of variation in critical life-history transitions remains unexplained, a significant proportion may be caused by early gender effects as part of gender-specific life histories shaped by sexual selection. In this study, we investi...

Susceptibility genes for schizophrenia have been hypothesised to mediate liability for the disorder at least partly by influencing cognitive performance. We investigated the association between genotype and cognitive performance for a Dysbindin risk haplotype which is associated with schizophrenia in our sample. Fifty-two patients with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder (24 risk haplotyp...

Chronic mental diseases (CMD) like the schizophrenias are progressive diseases of heterogenous but poorly understood biological origin. An imbalance in proteostasis is a hallmark of dysfunctional neurons, leading to impaired clearance and abnormal deposition of protein aggregates. Thus, it can be hypothesized that unbalanced proteostasis in such neurons may also lead to protein aggregates in sc...