The researchers think that depression could be caused by a single rouge gene. They have exposed errors in DNA which make people more prone to get the condition. The research team from Kings College London in collaboration with US team has pinpointed a segment of DNA which they believe is accountable for depression.
The particular area called chromosome 3p25-26 contains up to forty genes and one or more possibly cause the disease. Up to one in five individual will suffer from depression sometime in their life. Depression is frequently aroused by traumatic episodes like sorrow joblessness or divorce. Several people are more vulnerable to it.
In a study researchers examined the DNA of more than eight hundred British families having two or more siblings with depression. All at once another team from the Washington University Medical School in St Louis, the US, investigated ninety families in Australia and twenty-five families in Finland. The findings showed that depressed siblings had similar hereditary differences in same segment of their DNA.
The results of the study would propose that depression runs in families, with people inheriting genes from their close relatives. According to study author Gerome Breen, from the Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College London, in a large number of families where two or more siblings have depression they found strong substantiation that a section called chromosome 3p25-26 is robustly associated with the disorder.
These findings are really exhilarating because for the first time they have discovered a genetic locus for depression. The breakthrough in indulgent the risk for depression may get them closer to developing more effective treatments. Any one of forty genes in chromosome 3p25-26 could be accountable, added Prof Breen.
Therefore they are presently carrying out detailed sequencing investigation in forty of the families involved, reported the study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry.