A GROUNDBREAKING NEW STUDY THAT ANALYZED THE GENETIC DATA OF THOUSANDS OF PARTICIPANTS HAS IDENTIFIED 44 GENETIC LOCI LINKED WITH RISK OF DEPRESSION. THIS MAY DRIVE THE IMPLEMENTATION OF IMPROVED TREATMENTS FOR THIS CONDITION.
The National Institute of Mental Health deem major depression “one of the most common mental disorders in the United States.”
Around 16.2 million adults had “at least one” episode of major depression in 2016 alone.
Depression has many risk factors — biological, environmental, and of a psychological nature — and often it is a combination of these that leads to the development of the condition.
Of the biological factors, inherited genetic variations are often cited, though researchers have had a hard time in pinpointing which genetic locations in our DNA are specifically linked with a higher risk of depression.
But a large-scale new study has gone where no others have gone before and identified dozens of previously unknown genetic variations that constitute a risk factor for major depression.
The researchers involved in the study — including Dr. Patrick F. Sullivan, at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in Chapel Hill — note that studies of the human genome focused on risk factors for depression face many obstacles.
In their paper, which is published in the journal Nature Genetics, they write:
“There are many reasons why identifying causal loci for [major depressive disorder] has proven difficult. [Major depressive disorder] is probably influenced by many genetic loci, each with small effects, as are most common diseases, including psychiatric disorders.”
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