Possible Gene Regions for Schizophrenia Located
WEDNESDAY, July 1 (HealthDay News) -- Immune function may play a role in schizophrenia, say scientists who found that schizophrenia patients have genetic variations on a section of chromosome 6 that contains numerous genes associated with immune response.
That region of the human genome has not previously been suspected as a risk factor for schizophrenia, which affects about 1 in 100 people. It was already known that genetics account for about 80 percent of risk for schizophrenia. Most cases of the mental health disorder are believed to be caused by interactions between a large number of genes.
"That makes it hard to tease out, in a statistically significant way, any of these schizophrenia-associated genes," Dr. Douglas Levinson, director of the Program on the Genetics of Brain Function at Stanford University School of Medicine, said in a news release from the university.
But studying a large number of people can reveal that information, so Levinson and colleagues analyzed DNA data from three studies that included 27,000 people -- 8,000 with schizophrenia and 19,000 people without the disease.
The study participants were restricted to those of European ancestry.
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