Schizophrenia - Do Genes Correspond to Symptoms?

Doctor Anil Malhotra discusses emerging research relating specific genes to positive (DISC1) and negative (e.g. dysbindin) symptoms of schizophrenia.

An area of emerging interest is to look not just the diagnosis of schizophrenia as a phenotype but to look at symptom profiles of patients as a phenotype in these genetic studies. Our group at Zucker Hillside has focused a fair amount on looking at the gene dysbindin and we have noted that dysbindin seems to be associated with lifetime-severity of negative symptoms in our data set. This has been observed by other groups also. Other genes such as DISC1 we observe to be associated with positive symptoms. There is a large body of work now going on and we are trying to dissect the symptomatic heterogeneity of schizophrenia and looking at specific candidate genes and their relationships to symptomatology.