Vaughn at Mind Hacks has a nice piece on recent research, reported in Nature, on psychiatric genetics: Mental illness: in with the intron crowd. The original article, Psychiatric genetics: The brains of the family, appeared in Nature on 10 July (but it’s behind a subscription wall if you want to see the original — sorry). Daniel linked to Vaughn’s article in the last Wednesday Round Up (#20), but I wanted to make a further brief comment. Vaughn does a really nice job of laying out the key issues, so I’d recommend jumping over there if this brief discussion whets your appetite.
The problem for neuropsychiatry is that genetic links to psychiatric disorders are proving difficult to clearly define. Abbott explains the situation really well:
Finding genes involved in psychiatric conditions is proving to be particularly intractable because it is still unclear whether the various diagnoses are actually separate diseases with distinct underlying genetics or whether… they will dissolve under the genetic spotlight into one biological continuum. Indeed, some researchers suggest that it would be better to abandon conventional clinical definitions and focus instead on ‘intermediate phenotypes’, quantifiable characteristics such as brain structure, wiring and function that are midway between the risk genes involved and the psychopathology displayed.
Neuroanthropology 