Psychiatric Illnesses May Share Common Genetic Variant.

Medwire (10/23, Davenport) reports, “Disrupted in schizophrenia 1 (DISC1) gene variants play a role in the development of psychiatric illness yet there is significant heterogeneity in clinically relevant variants between populations,” according to a study  (http://tinyurl.com/DISC1-gene) in Molecular Psychiatry. “Although schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder (BD), major depression, autism, and Asperger syndrome have all been linked to DISC1, no actual causal variants have been identified.” But, after genotyping study participants “for the presence of 75 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the translin-associated protein X and DISC1 genes,” investigators discovered that “rs1538979 SNP was significantly associated with BD I males” and “the rs821577 SNP was significantly linked with BD females…at odds ratios of 2.73 and 1.64, respectively.”

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SAMHSA survey suggests one in 13 US adults experienced one bout of major depression in past year.

HealthDay (5/19, Mundell) reported that, according to a survey by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), “over the past year, 16.5 million Americans age 18 or older — one in 13 adults — experienced at least one bout of major depression,” and fewer “than two-thirds (64.5 percent) of those individuals got treated for their depression.” The SAMHSA survey “drew on data from the agency’s 2007 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, involving approximately 45,000 non-institutionalized adults.” The survey also found that “rates of major depressive episodes were higher among people aged 18 to 25 (8.9 percent) or 26 to 49 (8.5 percent), compared to Americans aged 50 and older (5.8 percent).” Nearly “7.5 percent of all American adults suffered at least one depressive episode.” Forty-three percent of “those with depression who did not receive treatment…said cost was the reason they did not get help.”

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