Brief report: no association between premorbid adjustment in adult-onset schizophrenia and genetic variation in Dysbindin.
Dysbindin gene variants do not predict premorbid adjustment in adult-onset schizophrenia.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team looked at 222 German adults who got schizophrenia after age 18.
They checked 36 spots on the Dysbindin gene to see if any linked to poor early life skills.
What they found
No spot on the gene predicted how well the adults had done in school or friends before they got sick.
The gene looked no different from chance.
How this fits with other research
Hatton et al. (2005) saw the opposite in kids. In that study, the same gene spots did predict poor early skills, but in children who got psychosis before age 13.
The two papers seem to clash, yet they test different life stages. Childhood-onset and adult-onset illness may follow different roads.
Smith et al. (2010) and Austin et al. (2015) also found null links between other genes and autism, showing that not every gene test pans out.
Why it matters
If you assess adults with schizophrenia, do not bank on Dysbindin test results to explain their early history. The gene tells us nothing useful here. Save your time and focus on skill-based records like school reports or family interviews instead.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Whereas Dysbindin is considered a schizophrenia vulnerability gene, there is no consistency of findings. Phenotype refinement approaches may help to increase the genetic homogeneity and thus reconcile conflicting results. Premorbid adjustment (PMA) has been suggested to aid the phenotypic dissection. Gornick et al. (J Autism Dev Disord 35:831-838, 2005) reported an association between Dysbindin and PMA in US-Caucasian individuals with childhood-onset psychosis. In a sample of 222 adult-onset schizophrenia inpatients from Germany, we could not detect an association between PMA and 36 SNPs in Dysbindin. Our results suggest that genetic variation in Dysbindin may not contribute to the schizophrenia phenotype with an onset beyond childhood. Further studies including even larger samples and more SNPs may be warranted to clarify the relationship between Dysbindin and PMA.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2008 · doi:10.1007/s10803-008-0582-6