Apr. 1, 2003 After years of frustrating searches for genes that
contribute to mental illness, researchers at Johns Hopkins
studying families with a severe form of manic depressive
illness, called psychotic bipolar disorder, may be one step
closer to finding the genetic underpinnings of both bipolar
disorder and schizophrenia. "Finding a gene for bipolar disorder
is like finding a needle in a haystack, but by focusing our
search on families with a distinctive form of the illness we
were able to pinpoint a region of the genome where disease genes
are likely to be found," said James Potash, M.D., assistant
professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins and lead author of a
report on the study in the April issue of the American Journal
of Psychiatry. Although genes are unlikely to tell the whole
story of major psychiatric diseases, the persistent frequency of
mental illness in about 1 percent of the global human
population, regardless of cultural or ethnic differences, and
its tendency to run in families have always po