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The Genetics of Schizophrenia is the Genetics of Neurodevelopment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Peter Jones  and
Robin M. Murray
Peter Jones*
Affiliation:
Genetics Section, Department of Psychological Medicine, Institute of Psychiatry and King's College Hospital
Robin M. Murray
Affiliation:
Institute of Psychiatry and King's College Hospital, London
*
∗Genetics Section, Institute of Psychiatry, De Crespigny Park, Denmark Hill, London SE5 8AF
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Extract

Genes are now accepted as being important in the aetiology of schizophrenia (Gottesman & Shields, 1982; McGuffin et al, 1987), and over the past decade the emphasis in genetic research has shifted away from genetic epidemiology to searching the chromosomal DNA for the genes themselves. Despite this increasing technical sophistication, the application of linkage analysis to families multiply affected by schizophrenia has been accompanied by the familiar controversy over the exact borders of the adult clinical phenotype (Sherrington et al, 1988; St Clair et al, 1989). Indeed, the preoccupation of researchers with the vagaries of the clinical definition has resulted in repeated attempts to use genetic studies to determine the relative validity of different operational definitions of schizophrenia (McGuffin et al, 1984; Farmer et al, 1987). To us, such studies beg the question of how precisely genes are involved in the aetiology of schizophrenia; after all, genes code for proteins, not for auditory hallucinations in the third person.

Type
Molecular Biology Symposium
Information
The British Journal of Psychiatry , Volume 158 , Issue 5 , May 1991 , pp. 615 - 623
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1991 

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