FAMILY RESEMBLANCE: A new study reveals clues to how most siblings of people with bipolar avoid the disease.© ISTOCK.COM/IMRSQUID

EDITOR'S CHOICE IN NEUROSCIENCE

The paper
G.E. Doucet et al., “The role of intrinsic brain functional connectivity in vulnerability and resilience to bipolar disorder,” Am J Psychiat, doi:10.1176/appi.ajp.2017.17010095, 2017.

Ties that don’t bind
Bipolar disorder often runs in families, but genetics alone don’t determine whether one develops the disease, says Sophia Frangou of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She and her colleagues wondered why siblings of affected people, despite having a slightly higher chance of developing mental illness, typically don’t.

In sync
Using fMRI, Frangou’s group previously found that, compared with the brains of bipolar patients, certain regions within healthy siblings’ brains responded more synchronously during memory and emotional processing tasks. To find out whether this reflects differences in brain organization, postdoc Gaelle Doucet imaged 78...