FLICKR, DANI LURIEThe genetic underpinnings of depression have remained frustratingly elusive. But by scanning the genomes of hundreds of thousands of individuals, a team has located 15 genomic sites implicated in depression among people of European descent. The group reported its findings yesterday (August 1) in Nature Genetics.
“It’s a markedly better step than I believe anybody has taken before,” Patrick Sullivan, a geneticist who studies depression at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, told STAT News.
The team, led by researchers at Pfizer, utilized a trove of genotyping data from the direct-to-consumer genetics company 23andMe, whose customers can opt to make their results—including medical history questionnaires—anonymously available to researchers. The team scanned the genomes of more than 141,000 people of European ancestry who had been diagnosed with depression as well as those of more than 330,000 healthy controls. While the majority of the data came from 23andMe’s database, some was derived from a prior genome-wide association study (GWAS) led by the Psychiatric Genomic Consortium, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) noted ...
