Archives of general psychiatry
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Arch. Gen. Psychiatry · Sep 2010
Multicenter Study Comparative StudyImpaired intellect and memory: a missing link between genetic risk and schizophrenia?
The DSM-IV concept of schizophrenia offers diagnostic reliability but etiologic and pathologic heterogeneity, which probably contributes to the inconsistencies in genetic studies. One solution is to identify intermediate phenotypes, "narrower" constructs of liability, that hypothetically share genetic risk with the disorder. Although a variety of candidate intermediate phenotypes have emerged, few have explicitly quantified the extent of their genetic overlap with schizophrenia. ⋯ Using the largest international familial schizophrenia cohort to date, we showed that a substantial portion of the phenotypic correlation between schizophrenia and cognition is caused by shared genetic effects. However, because the phenotypic and genetic correlations are far from unity, the genetics of schizophrenia are clearly not merely the genetics of cognition.
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Arch. Gen. Psychiatry · Sep 2010
Comparative StudyCorrelation of glutamate levels in the anterior cingulate cortex with self-reported impulsivity in patients with borderline personality disorder and healthy controls.
Dysfunction and deficits in the structure of the anterior cingulate cortex have been reported in borderline personality disorder (BPD). To our knowledge, there is only 1 published study to date investigating anterior cingulate cortex metabolism in subjects with BPD and co-occurring attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder using proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Impulsivity is a key feature of BPD and can be related to anterior cingulate cortex function. ⋯ Our results support the hypothesis that higher glutamate concentration in the anterior cingulate cortex is associated with both severity of BPD symptoms and subjective impulsivity ratings, the latter independent of BPD. Further studies should confirm the association between enhanced glutamate concentration in the anterior cingulate cortex and behavioral measures of impulsivity.