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Dr. Bob is Robert Hsiung, MD,
bob@dr-bob.orgShown: posts 1 to 9 of 9. This is the beginning of the thread.
Posted by Toph on September 6, 2013, at 8:54:39
I appear to be the first person to have Bipolar I Disorder in my immediate family, and I have always wondered whether there was some combination of recessive genes that caused it. So I recently stumbled on an association between BiPolar and type O blood - my blood type. I searched blood type issues and saw that people discussed an association between blood type and depression three years ago here. What do people think about this?
http://www.dadamo.com/knowbase/PATHbase/depict.cgi?16
http://www.researchgate.net/publication/10967563_Blood_type_and_bipolar_disorder
Posted by Phillipa on September 6, 2013, at 9:44:59
In reply to Blood Type association, posted by Toph on September 6, 2013, at 8:54:39
Since type 0 blood is the Universal blood type and used in transfusions when a patients blood type is not known I don't think I believe this. Wouldn't type 0 be the type blood of the most people? Phillipa
Posted by alexandra_k on September 6, 2013, at 14:03:40
In reply to Re: Blood Type association » Toph, posted by Phillipa on September 6, 2013, at 9:44:59
> Since type 0 blood is the Universal blood type and used in transfusions when a patients blood type is not known I don't think I believe this. Wouldn't type 0 be the type blood of the most people? Phillipa
Whether an allele is dominant or not is a separate issue from how frequent the allele is in the population. Huntington's is caused by a rare (dominant) allele affecting 1 in 20,000. With blood type O is the wild type / ancestral form and A and B are mutations from the O allele that arose in the last 20,000 years. While A and B are dominant over O (and co-dominant with each other) they are still relatively infrequent.
At least that is what the internet leads me to believe...
Posted by jane d on September 6, 2013, at 17:46:38
In reply to Re: Blood Type association » Toph, posted by Phillipa on September 6, 2013, at 9:44:59
> Since type 0 blood is the Universal blood type and used in transfusions when a patients blood type is not known I don't think I believe this. Wouldn't type 0 be the type blood of the most people? Phillipa
Type O is called the Universal Donor type because it can be given to people with different blood types without them having a reaction to it. Not because of its frequency.
Posted by alexandra_k on September 6, 2013, at 19:55:35
In reply to Re: Blood Type association » Phillipa, posted by jane d on September 6, 2013, at 17:46:38
Though OO does turn out to be the most frequent blood type.
This is the first time I've heard of mental disorder possibly being linked to alleles that code for blood type...
But this is a new area for me... I had a look... There was some stuff that found a link (fairly small sample size, seemed to me). A while ago. In the 70's. Then one study failed to find a link (and those are hard to get published). Nothing I could see on this recently. If there was a link I think we would be hearing about it a lot because that would be a significant discovery indeed. But maybe I'm missing something.
Best I can figure... The main current line is looking at what severe mental disorders might have genetically in common rather than considering bi-polar distinct from depression distinct from schizophrenia. Focus is on 5 alleles. Or 5 locations for alleles. Or something. This is a new area for me.
Sickle-cell anemia has been very inspiring. It turns out that there is an allele such that when individuals have the recessive form (two of them) they have sickle-cell anemia (which is bad). But when they have only one of them (heterozygote form) they have an advantage by having some sickle-cells which are resistant to maleria but not so many sickle-cells to result in them clotting up the capillaries. Or something like this.
So... Harmful genes can be tolerated as part of a trade-off. And mental illness could be the result of recessive genes... But I'd be surprised if they turned out to be significantly linked to the ones that code for blood type... Though stranger things have happened...
Posted by Phillipa on September 6, 2013, at 20:47:03
In reply to Re: Blood Type association » Phillipa, posted by jane d on September 6, 2013, at 17:46:38
Jane I know always given if emergency and blood type not known. I should have worded it a bit for carefully. Phillipa
Posted by alexandra_k on September 7, 2013, at 0:57:37
In reply to Re: Blood Type association, posted by alexandra_k on September 6, 2013, at 19:55:35
Actually...
The heterozygote advantage thing could be especially likely if heterozygotes have intermediate phenotypes between two extremes. As seems to be the case with the sickle-cell anemia / malaria resistance gene.
And if intermediate phenotypes are favored, of course. Not like the case where you either need to camouflage into black or camouflage into white but grey or black and white spots, stripes, or rings, will get you killed everywhere.
Posted by alexandra_k on September 7, 2013, at 1:07:59
In reply to Re: Blood Type association, posted by alexandra_k on September 7, 2013, at 0:57:37
the problem seems to be to identify the 'characters' and the 'traits'.
e.g., mendel studied pea plants. the 'characters' he studied were: flower color. seed color. pod color. pod shape. etc. and the 'traits' are the variants of the characters. so purple or white (flower color). green or yellow (seed color).
mendel was a lucky lucky man that he picked pea plants where the characters are obvious to his eye, the traits are similarly obvious to his eye, the characters map to genes (locations on chromosomes) and the traits map to alleles (different versions at the locus).
if he had have picked harder characters... like the range of skin color in humans... or seed size... or human height... he would have had a harder time of things. because there isn't a single gene or a particular allele that controls that. it is messier.
for mental illness...
what are the 'characters'?
sometimes characters can be hard to find... morgan bred fruit flies (oh god i am starting to get sick of reading about freaking fruit flies) trying to find a 'character' - something that there was phenotypic variation on. he bred them for years and was getting tired of his fruit flies and then all of a sudden he got a fruit fly with white eyes instead of the usual red! so now he had a 'character' (eye color) and 'traits' (red, white). and so now he can see about getting individuals who 'breed true' (are homozygotes for the traits) and then he can see how they play in Mendellian fashion...
but what are the 'characters' for mental illness?
does the DSM provide categories of 'traits'?
conceptually confusing...
Posted by alexandra_k on September 12, 2013, at 5:04:48
In reply to Re: Blood Type association, posted by alexandra_k on September 7, 2013, at 1:07:59
someone said 'it is easy to tell the brains of schizophrenics - theirs are the brains that look normal'. i'm starting to think that the same thing applies to the genetics of mental disorder. easy to tell. the ones that look normal.
i've been learning...
i remember finding a couple studies a few years back on the iceland genome project. it was a big (big big) deal because of the extensive records that had been kept over successive generations. some stuff on mental disorder... i showed it to some biology people... had a reading group on it... and they kind of scrunched up their noses. said that the findings were statistically significant... but only just. Given error margins...
the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) has introduced the Research Domain Criterion (RDC) which is an attempt at an alternative classification system from the DSM. They are trying to carve up categories that might turn out to map onto specific brain pathologies and to map onto specific genes. Because... After years of research and millions of dollars of funding our understanding of DSM diagnostic categories hasn't gotten us particularly far. DSM is still used clinically (for health insurance). But the future of psychiatry... Will be in some future version of the RDC categories... As they eventually manage to revise the categories into validated kinds (with behavioral profile mapping to neurobiology mapping to genes).
> Still being developed, the RDoC system began with five broad domains of psychological function that appear especially ripe for integration with recent developments in neuroscience. In addition to social processes, these are cognitive systems (attention, perception, working memory), positive valence systems (reward, appetitive behaviors), negative valence systems (depression, defeat, loss), and arousal-regulatory systems (activity, sleep, rhythms).
http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2012/research-domain-criteria-rdoc.shtml
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