Behavioral Genetics of Affective and Anxiety Disorders

Abstract

As shown by clinical genetic studies, affective and anxiety disorders are complex genetic disorders with genetic and environmental factors interactively determining their respective pathomechanism. Advances in molecular genetic techniques including linkage studies, association studies, and genome-wide association studies allow for the detailed dissection of the genetic influence on the development of these disorders. Besides the molecular genetic investigation of categorical entities according to standardized diagnostic criteria, intermediate phenotypes comprising neurobiological or neuropsychological traits (e.g., neuronal correlates of emotional processing) that are linked to the disease of interest and that are heritable, have been proposed to be closer to the underlying genotype than the overall disease phenotype. These intermediate phenotypes are dimensional and more precisely defined than the categorical disease phenotype, and therefore have attracted much interest in the genetic investigation of affective and anxiety disorders. Given the complex genetic nature of affective and anxiety disorders with an interaction of multiple risk genes and environmental influences, the interplay of genetic factors with environmental factors is investigated by means of gene-environment interaction (GxE) studies. Pharmacogenetic studies aid in the dissection of the genetically influenced heterogeneity of psychotropic drug response and may contribute to the development of a more individualized treatment of affective and anxiety disorders. Finally, there is some evidence for genetic factors potentially shared between affective and anxiety disorders pointing to a possible overlapping phenotype between anxiety disorders and depression.

Do genetic risk scores for body mass index predict risk of phobic anxiety? Evidence for a shared genetic risk factor

“…(Samaan et al, 2013) Because the genetics of anxiety and depression are thought to be similar (Domschke and Reif, 2012), it is difficult to explain the harmful effect of FTO on phobic anxiety in our study as compared to the protective effect of FTO on depression reported in the Samaan et al investigation. It is possible that there are differences between ethnic populations as the study of Samaan et al failed to provide a significant effect when analyzing the white population only.…”

Stress-related genes and heroin addiction: A role for a functional FKBP5 haplotype

“…Numerous molecular genetic studies have evaluated the association between polymorphisms in stress-related genes and affective disorders (Domschke and Reif, 2012), but only a few studies have reported an association of variants in these genes with specific drug addictions. We have previously performed association studies of heroin addiction that include several genes related to stress response (Levran et al, 2008; Proudnikov et al, 2008; Levran et al, 2009).…”

FKBP5 modulates the hippocampal connectivity deficits in depression: a study in twins

“…Secondly, since previous research has shown that both depression and the brain network metrics are influenced by genes and environment (Bohlken et al 2014;Domschke and Reif 2012;Leonardo and Hen 2006), an additional regression procedure (Begg and Parides 2003;Córdova-Palomera 2015) Values calculated from the number of streamlines (NOS)-weighted matrices SD standard deviation was implemented to determine whether the above mentioned results were driven by the familial or non-genetic factors. Specifically, the previous regression model was tuned using, along with the familial-level covariates gender, age and genotype,…”