Human head sliceWIKIMEDIA, NATIONAL LIBRARY OF MEDICINEScientists compared gene expression in the brains of people with autism and schizophrenia with that in controls, finding 106 genes that were expressed at lower levels in the brains of the former groups, according to a study published last month (May 24) in Translational Psychiatry. The findings add to growing evidence that the disorders may be linked in some way.
“On the one hand, it’s exciting because it tells us that there’s a lot of overlap,” Jeremy Willsey, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the work, told Spectrum News. “On the other hand, these are fairly general things that are overlapping.”
Previously, Dan Arking, a professor of genetic medicine at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and colleagues measured gene expression in postmortem brain tissue from 32 people with autism and 40 controls. In the present study, the researchers compared these data with gene-expression information collected by the Stanley Medical Research Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland, from the postmortem brain tissue of 31 people with schizophrenia, 25 with bipolar disorder, and 26 controls.
Arking’s team ...
