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With Two Affected Parents, Schizophrenia Risk in Offspring Skyrockets 9 March 2010. Having two parents with schizophrenia multiplies the risk of offspring following in their footsteps to a psychiatric facility...
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DISC1: Brief Loss in Prenatal Life Leads to Problems Later On 2 March 2010. If schizophrenia has its roots in early brain development, why does the disease most often appear in adolescence or early adulthood?...
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Rac Your Brain to Forget? 2 March 2010. It can be a good thing to forget, especially when learned information becomes useless or overly troubling...
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Spotlight
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Current Papers 26 February to 4 March 2010
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Our automated search pulled in 111 papers for this week. Remember that you can also display the previous week's papers by selecting them from the dropdown menu at the "Current Papers" field in the Search interface.
Please help us create an online discussion community by picking a paper from the past week, month, or even six months, that really deserves a comment, and then writing that comment today. If you have time, sketch out your impressions in a few paragraphs, a mini-review as it were. If you only have time for the three-sentence "bottom line," that can also be valuable. On to the papers ... |
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250 Meta-analyses in the New and Improved SZGene!
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The SZGene team is (l to r) Brit-Maren Schjeide, Lars Bertram, Ute Zauft, Christina Lill, and Johannes Roehr.
The SchizophreniaGene database, created and maintained by Lars Bertram and colleagues at the Max-Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin, Germany (with the technical assistance of our colleagues at the Alzheimer Research Forum), has become a touchstone for the schizophrenia genetics community, and it has just become even more useful. A new revision includes a grading system for all positive meta-analyses for association with schizophrenia, new ways to visualize the accumulating data, non-Caucasian ethnic sub-analyses, the addition of nearly 200 studies (including featured genes from GWAS) since last summer, and more. As Bertram explains to SRF's Pat McCaffrey in an extensive "User Guide Q&A," the old grading system based on effect size has been replaced by one that uses criteria developed by the Human Genome Epidemiology Network (HuGENet).
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So what are the highlights? Well, to start with, the Top Results list is headed by a gene with the unusual moniker, piggyBac transposable element derived 1 (PGBD1), from one of the GWAS published in Nature last summer (see SRF news story). Fourteen other genes show strong epidemiologic support, though Bertram cautions that "Clearly not all of them will pan out to be true schizophrenia genes, but getting that A grade takes something for any genetic finding." Furthermore, the inclusion of meta-analyses within ethnic groups other than Caucasians means that the old favorite, D-amino acid oxidase activator (DAOA), can be shown to have a positive meta-analysis in Southeast Asian studies, "…something that we would have missed before," says Bertram.
The compendium now includes featured genes of all association studies, including large-scale studies such as GWAS, mitochondrial gene studies, and updates on linkage studies. We invite you to read Bertram's Users Guide, explore the new SZGene, and help with QC. With 1,600 studies and over 8,000 polymorphisms, Bertram notes that there will probably be errors, so please contact him with any you notice so that his team can fix them as soon as possible. Image credit: Dirk Wendland
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Welcome to the Schizophrenia Research Forum!
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Welcome to the Schizophrenia Research Forum website—a virtual community for science about schizophrenia and related disorders. Our Mission is to help researchers in their quest for causes, improved treatments, and better understanding of schizophrenia. Read more about ways to browse the site.
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What's New
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Comments - Posted 5 March 2010 Read remarks by Tadeusz Nasierowski ONLINE DISCUSSION: Psychiatric Genocide—Nazi Attempts to Eradicate Schizophrenia |
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Comments - Posted 4 March 2010 Read remarks by John McGrath about Gottesman II et al. PAPER: Severe mental disorders in offspring with 2 psychiatrically ill parents. |
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Jobs - Posted 4 March 2010 Postdoctoral Fellow: McLean Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Belmont, Massachusetts. |
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Comments - Posted 2 March 2010 Read remarks by Jacqueline Rose about
Hayashi-Takagi A et al. NEWS: DISC1 and SNAP23 Emerge In NMDA Receptor Signaling |
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Comments - Posted 1 March 2010 Read remarks by Mikhail Pletnikov about Vuillermot S et al. PAPER: A longitudinal examination of the neurodevelopmental impact of prenatal immune activation in mice reveals primary defects in dopaminergic development relevant to schizophrenia. |
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Conferences - Posted 26 February 2010 WFSBP 2011 (World Federation of Societies of Biological Psychiatry): 29 May 2011-2 June 2011, Prague Congress Centre, Prague, Czech Republic. |
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