Genes 2 Brains 2 Mind 2 Me

One of the difficulties in understanding mental illness is that so many aspects of mental life can go awry – and its a challenge to understand what abnormalities are directly linked to causes and what abnormalities might be consequences or later ripples in a chain reaction of neural breakdown.  Ideally, one would prefer to treat the fundamental cause, rather than only offer palliative measures for symptoms that arise from tertiary neural inefficiencies. In their research article entitled, “Evidence That Altered Amygdala Activity in Schizophrenia Is Related to Clinical State and Not Genetic Risk“, [doi: 10.1176/appi.ajp.2008.08020261] (audio link) Rasetti and colleagues explore this issue.

Specifically, they focus on the function of the amygdala and its role in responding to, and processing, social and emotional information.  In schizophrenia, it has been found that this brain region can be somewhat unresponsive when viewing faces displaying fearful expressions – and so, the authors ask whether the response of the amygdala to fearful faces is, itself, an aspect of the disorder that can be linked to underlying genetic risk (a type of core, fundamental cause).

To do this, the research team assembled 3 groups of participants: 34 patients, 29 of their unaffected siblings and 20 demographically and ethnically matched control subjects.  The rationale was that if a trait – such as amygdala response – was similar for the patient/sibling comparison and dissimilar for the patient/control comparison, then one can conclude that the similarity is underlain by the similarity or shared genetic background of the patients and their siblings.  When the research team colected brain activity data in response to a facial expression matching task performed in an MRI scanner, they found that the patient/sibling comparison was not-similar, but rather the siblings were more similar to healthy controls instead of their siblings.  This suggests that the trait (amygdala response) is not likely to be directly related to core genetic risk factor(s) of schizophrenia, but rather related to apsects of the disorder that are consequences, or the state, of having the disorder.

A follow-up study using a different trait (prefrontal cortex activity during a working memory task) showed that this trait was similar for the patient/sibling contrast, but dissimilar for the patient/control contrast – suggesting that prefrontal cortex function IS somewhat linked to core genetic risk.  Congratulations to the authors on this very informative study!