Projects / Programmes
Molecular Genetic Study of Brain RNA in Completed Suicides
| Code |
Science |
Field |
Subfield |
| 3.09.00 |
Medical sciences |
Psychiatry |
|
| Code |
Science |
Field |
| B650 |
Biomedical sciences |
Psychiatry, clinical psychology, psychosomatics |
| B680 |
Biomedical sciences |
Public health, epidemiology |
Psychiatric genetics, suicide, genetic models, gene expression, environmental factors, RNA analysis
Researchers (11)
Abstract
Suicidal behaviour is not attributable to one single cause. It is the consequence of a complex interaction of several factors. A potentially promising and comprehensive method for identifying risk factors for suicide would be to consider that they are composed of genetic and environmental influences and their interactions. Indeed, factors other than environmental stressors alone, may be implicit in determining the high suicide rate in Slovenia. Such factors could include genetic predisposition. Evidence regarding a role for genetic risk factors for suicide comes from family, twin, and adoption studies relating to suicidal behaviour. More recently, several molecular genetic studies have been undertaken that suggest potential alleles associated with the risk of suicide. One of the problems that has pervaded association studies in suicidology has been that attempted replications have been on so small a scale as to have little power to confirm original positive findings. Hence, one way forward is to obtain results on a much bigger sample, which has been already started by our group on 900 suicides and 900 controls. Alternatively, one can also try to extract and analyse brain RNA in order to quantitate the expression of candidate genes associated with suicide. The latter has been proposed in the present study. This is a rather novel approach in the field of suicidology genetics. It can however provide valid results even on a smaller sample (e.g. 100 suicides and 100 controls) knowing that quantity of gene expression and not presence or absence of genes is studied.
