Scolnick Edward M
Psychiatric Disease Initiative, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA.
Biol Psychiatry. 2006 Jun 1;59(11):1039-45. doi: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2006.02.022. Epub 2006 Apr 17.
This paper is not a comprehensive review of the literature. Rather, it is a viewpoint based upon advances in other fields of medicine and genetics that may provide a model for guiding research in psychiatry. The paper discusses the major limitations of the medicines currently used to treat schizophrenia and bipolar illness. The limitations in our understanding of the molecular causes of these two illnesses and our lack of a clear mechanism of action for many of the medicines used to treat them continue to confound the field and impede progress towards finding novel treatments. Until the genetic bases of bipolar illness and schizophrenia are unambiguously identified, progress towards improved diagnosis and treatment will be retarded. An approach to identifying risk genes based upon association studies starting with very large sample sizes based upon currently available diagnoses of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia is advocated.
本文并非对文献的全面综述。相反，它是基于医学和遗传学其他领域的进展而形成的一种观点，可能为指导精神病学研究提供一个模型。本文讨论了目前用于治疗精神分裂症和双相情感障碍的药物的主要局限性。我们对这两种疾病分子病因的理解存在局限，且用于治疗它们的许多药物缺乏明确的作用机制，这继续困扰着该领域，并阻碍了寻找新治疗方法的进展。在双相情感障碍和精神分裂症的基因基础被明确识别之前，改善诊断和治疗的进展将受到阻碍。本文提倡一种基于关联研究来识别风险基因的方法，该研究从基于目前双相情感障碍和精神分裂症现有诊断的非常大的样本量开始。
