Genetics and mental ill health.

A subject that interests a lot of people either because they are considering never having children or looking for a illness scape goat ie

It was in my genes what else could you expect!  and therefore nothing to do with their conscious decision making or actions. Or

I’m ill you can’t expect any better from me

As an aside, please, please watch Gattaca lovely film and really demonstrates the problems associated with this. It champions the human spirit and what can be achieved when you have the will.

As a scientist articles such as these

Gene that raises suicide risk identified

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/nov/14/gene-raises-suicide-risk

Report: Genetic link to depression explored

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6692256/ns/health-mental_health/t/report-genetic-link-depression-explored/

Cause a certain amount of curiosity however I am usually disappointed by there lack of what I call ‘scientific rigor’ and having read them proceed to pull them to pieces and then very quickly dismiss them as overblown hype without foundation.

Points to note when reading scientific reports

·         Samples size needs to have been calculated using a formula that takes into account all the variables of the data set. Usually you would expect it to be large...probably over 1000 in each sub set, though depending on what you are doing it may be possible to get reasonable results with only 500 but beware of same sizes around 100 these are likely to be way too small.

·         Need comparable controls to the same magnitude as the test sub sets.

·          Sensible statistics with 95% confidence intervals with standard errors and a t-test significant to at least 5% would show if the gene was significantly more prevalent in the test population than the population as a whole.

·         Correlations are not causal links and you cannot infer that one thing happens because of what is present without rigorous multi-factorial research.

·         Peer review by the leading scientists in the field is prerequisite for publication in scientific journals but not for newspapers.

Neither of these articles impresses at all and this may be because of the reporting but it is more likely to be because there was nothing of note to report. Suppositions and inferences are not facts and reporting such conclusions at this stage is far too early.

So my scientific rant over what is known about the genetics of mental health problems?

Family-linkage and twin studies have indicated that genetic factors often play an important role in the development of mental disorders. The reliable identification of specific genetic susceptibility to particular disorders, through linkage or association studies, has proven difficult

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_mental_disorders

And if you look on the internet you find that although ‘faulty genes’ are reported as being linked to one or other mental health problem no figures of susceptibility or risk are quoted. In this article by the BBC (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4445636.stm) Mental illness genetic risk found you find it reports

Professor David Porteous at the University of Edinburgh, who led the work, said: "It is now clear that the DISC1 gene plays an important role in the risk of developing schizophrenia or bipolar affective disorder [manic depression].

"The new genetic link we have made to PDE4B and how that links back to DISC1 sheds much needed light on these debilitating disorders. It also suggests a new way of thinking about developing better and effective medicines."

But he added: "Risk isn't all controlled by genes. It's very much an interaction between genes and environmental factors.”

In other words they really don’t know what makes one person become ill or even how much more susceptible you are given the genes you carry.

Mental illnesses in parents represent a risk for children in the family. These children have a higher risk for developing mental illnesses than other children. When both parents are mentally ill, the chance is even greater that the child might become mentally ill

http://www.aacap.org/cs/root/facts_for_families/children_of_parents_with_mental_illness

However it is important to note

The effect of parental mental illness on children is varied and unpredictable.[1] Although parental mental illness presents biological, psychosocial and environmental risks for children, not all children will be negatively affected, or in the same way. The parental diagnosis of mental illness alone is not sufficient to cause problems for the child and family. Rather, it is how the diagnosis affects the parent's behaviour as well as familial relationships that may cause risk to a child. The age of onset, severity and duration of the parents' mental illness, the degree of stress in the family resulting from the parents' illness, and most importantly, the extent to which parents' symptoms interfere with positive parenting, such as their ability to show interest in their children, will determine the level of risk to a child.

http://www.nmha.org/go/information/get-info/strengthening-families/when-a-parent-has-a-mental-illness-from-risk-to-resiliency-protective-factors-for-children

The fact is that most of the researches into genetic factors associated with mental ill health are using the information for improving drug treatments and any suggestion like this from ‘Gene that raises suicide risk identified’

The gene is among several that might ultimately be used to screen people with serious depression to identify those that need the closest supervision while being treated.

"If we knew who had an enhanced risk of suicide, we could change our approach to their care," said John Mann, chief neuroscientist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute

Is rediculous given the statistics they are quoting for the gene.

43% of the depressed patients who had attempted suicide had two copies of a particular variant of the RGS2 gene, while fewer than a fifth of them had two copies of a "safer" variant of the gene

That’s just under half, which is not a really significant number, and they give no indication of how many people without the gene who had attempted suicide, fatal flaw in my book.

Will this finding change anything?

Well it may, however not in the way they are suggesting, a greater understanding of how the physical body and interplay of the various different genes will be good for scientific understanding and possibly in application of new drugs to help allieveate symptoms.

The reality is though that even if you are faced with someone who is talking/ planning suicide and they don’t have a predisposition for it as a professional they will take you seriously because it is their job to do so.

I just wish people would have more sense than to give these kinds of ideas the spin they have been which can only inflame the emotions of people: especially as these ideas are almost certainly going to get a tanking for being total impractical when they are peer reviewed and really the press does not need to publish the findings in this manner.