People with schizophrenia bear an "increased burden" of rare
deletions and duplications of genetic material, genome-wide, say
researchers supported in part by the National Institute of
Mental Health (NIMH), a component of the National Institutes of
Health (NIH). "Although many of us have these changes in our
genetic material, they are about 15 percent more frequent in
people with schizophrenia," explained Pamela Sklar, M.D., Ph.D.,
of Harvard University and the Stanley Center for Psychiatric
Research. "We also discovered two large areas of chromosomal
deletions that confer a great deal of risk for schizophrenia and
confirm involvement of a third previously reported area." Sklar
and colleagues in the International Schizophrenia Consortium
team, representing 11 research institutes worldwide, report on
the largest study of its kind to date, online July 30, 2008, in
the journal Nature. "By implicating two previously unknown
sites, this study triples the number of genomic areas definitely
linked to schizophrenia,"