Four types of mental illness are easy to inherit. Do you have a family history?

Release date: 2015-07-22

Finding the hereditary nature of a particular mental illness makes sense.

First of all, this can remind those with mental illness to seriously consider whether to have a baby.

Second, this can help parents better understand their early behaviors. For example, a very anxious child is likely to have a more serious mental illness, such as depression, in the future.

In the end, it can provide an answer to those who are suffering from the disease (about why they are), and let us see the possibility of treatment – ​​despite the long road ahead. Many mental illnesses have their genetic basis, but we are far from being able to fully understand all the genes involved.

The heritability of the following four diseases is supported by the most research evidence, but they are by no means the only four.

1 OCD

People have done a lot of genetic research on obsessive-compulsive disorder, but a decisive study was in 2000. The researchers investigated patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder in Baltimore and Washington, DC, and found a strong link between OCD and patients with OCD in the family. In 2010, research went a step further: it was discovered that obsessive-compulsive disorder may be associated with certain specific chromosomes. Given the impossibility of impulsive and compulsive behavior that has brought many problems to patients, this study has brought hope to future generations.

However, things are not so simple. OCD may also be caused by environmental factors. The gene cannot fully answer why and how it happened. Genes are not the whole answer.

2 Schizophrenia (schizophrenia is not a personality disorder)

Schizophrenia is one of the most difficult mental illnesses for diagnosis and treatment. People are now increasingly convinced that it is related to chemical imbalances in the brain that can be inherited. The data doesn't lie: a parent with schizophrenia has a 40% chance of giving birth to a child with the same schizophrenia; if your identical twins suffer from the disease, the probability increases to 50%. In 2014, there were two breakthrough studies on genetic heritability. Scientists have found that there is no single "schizophrenic gene", but different schizophrenia symptoms are caused by many different genes. One study found that eight different genes were associated with eight different symptoms of schizophrenia; another study involving 113,000 found 128 different genetic variants associated with the disease. Not only that. In the same year, a Harvard study found that in the brains of patients with schizophrenia, the connection and separation of neuronal cells is not normal, and the transmission of information is always transmitted. And they believe that this is likely to be a genetic problem. Knowledge supplement: Schizophrenia is a group of severe psychiatric diseases with unknown etiology. It is often slow or subacute onset in young and middle-aged patients. It is often manifested as a syndrome with different symptoms, involving perception, thinking, emotion and behavior. Obstacles and disharmony of mental activity. The patient is generally conscious and the intelligence is basically normal, but some patients may suffer from cognitive impairment during the course of the disease. The course of the disease is generally delayed, recurrent, aggravated or worsened. Some patients eventually experience depression and mental disability, but some patients can be cured or basically healed after treatment.

3 bipolar disorder

Like schizophrenia, chemical imbalances are likely to be key in bipolar disorder, but many environmental factors also play an important role. However, the genetic prevalence of the disease is very high: if your twins have this condition, your chance of getting sick is 89%-93%. Similarly, it may not be caused by a single gene. We can't completely eliminate bipolar disorder by simply finding a gene and changing it (the so-called "gene therapy"). More complicated is that there are two subtypes of two-way obstacles, type I and type II.

If someone in your family has type II disease, then you are likely to inherit and develop type I or type II; as for type I, I don't know why it is not. Knowledge supplement: Bipolar disorder is a type of mood disorder, which refers to a type of disease that has both manic episodes and depressive episodes. The study found that there are often mild and transient depressive episodes before manic episodes, so most scholars believe that manic episodes are bipolar disorders, and only depressive episodes are single-phase disorders. Bipolar disorder is divided into two subtypes, biphasic type I refers to manic or mixed episodes and major depressive episodes, and biphasic type II refers to hypomanic and major depressive episodes without manic episodes.

4 depression

You probably already know: If your close relatives are suffering from depression, then you are very likely to do so. Environmental factors play an important role in the development of depression, but the power of genes can not be underestimated. A lot of research facts show that genes make us sad. Let's go back to 2011, a large study seems to confirm that the chromosome "3p25-26" may trigger depression. About 40% of patients can point to at least one close relative who has the same disease, and the actual data may be higher than this.

All in all, the old tune: The depression is the result of a combination of genetic and environmental factors (such as stress, sadness, trauma, etc.), and the gene cannot provide all the answers.

Source: Omelette Net