Abstract
The development of molecular psychiatry in the last few decades identified a number of candidate genes that could be associated with schizophrenia. A great number of studies often result with controversial and non-conclusive outputs. However, it was determined that each of the implicated candidates would independently have a minor effect on the susceptibility to that disease. Herein we report results from our replication study for association using 255 Bulgarian patients with schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder and 556 Bulgarian healthy controls. We have selected from the literatures 202 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in 59 candidate genes, which previously were implicated in disease susceptibility, and we have genotyped them. Of the 183 SNPs successfully genotyped, only 1 SNP, rs6277 (C957T) in the DRD2 gene (P=0.0010, odds ratio=1.76), was considered to be significantly associated with schizophrenia after the replication study using independent sample sets. Our findings support one of the most widely considered hypotheses for schizophrenia etiology, the dopaminergic hypothesis.
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Acknowledgements
We express our gratitude to all members of the SNP Research Center (The Institute of Physical and Chemical Research) for their contribution to the completion of our study. We thank all patients, their families and all the healthy volunteers for their generous participation in this project. We are also grateful to the doctors from all the participating clinics in Bulgaria.
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Betcheva, E., Mushiroda, T., Takahashi, A. et al. Case–control association study of 59 candidate genes reveals the DRD2 SNP rs6277 (C957T) as the only susceptibility factor for schizophrenia in the Bulgarian population. J Hum Genet 54, 98–107 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/jhg.2008.14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/jhg.2008.14
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