Bringing The World Home To You

© 2024 WUNC North Carolina Public Radio
120 Friday Center Dr
Chapel Hill, NC 27517
919.445.9150 | 800.962.9862
91.5 Chapel Hill 88.9 Manteo 90.9 Rocky Mount 91.1 Welcome 91.9 Fayetteville 90.5 Buxton 94.1 Lumberton 99.9 Southern Pines 89.9 Chadbourn
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Study Locates Possible Genetic Markers of Schizophrenia

A DNA rendering
YNSE
/
Flickr

An international team of researchers has made landmark progress on the study of Schizophrenia.

A consortium co-founded by the University of North Carolina's Patrick Sullivan reports that it's identified 108 points of genetic variation in people with the illness.

The study, published in Nature, sampled 36,000 patients -- the largest group in the history of genetic psychiatry. By working with so many individuals, and identifying so many points of variation, the picture we have of Schizophrenia in now both more nuance and more complicated.

“We're dealing with something that is a lot more subtle,” Sullivan said. “And because it's more subtle, it means it's more complicated. Really for the first time, we're peeking under the hood of Schizophrenia. We're getting a sense of what it is and what it isn't, and where to focus our efforts.”

Sullivan said having such a large sample size was the key factor in making the gains in variation determination.

“Every time we increase the number of cases we actually get a bigger bang for the buck,” he said. “So for example, we had a previous version of this analysis [back in 2006] -- in that analysis we had 25,000 cases and 62 associations. In the current one, we increased the sample size by 50 percent, but the number of association went up by 200 percent.”

Sullivan hopes to begin work on an even larger group in the near future, potentially looking at more than 50,000 subjects.

Stories, features and more by WUNC News Staff. Also, features and commentary not by any one reporter.
Related Stories
More Stories