Robert Freedman, M.D., editor of the American Journal of Psychiatry (AJP) has selected a paper by Rebecca Birnbaum, M.D., and colleagues, as a noteworthy paper of 2014 in a year-end review, featuring the paper as “particularly interesting and important.” The paper, published in AJP in July, reports findings from an investigation as to whether the prenatal expression of specific psychiatric disease-associated genes may ‘kick start’ atypical brain development that can lead to neurodevelopmental disorders including autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and schizophrenia. Dr. Freedman notes that the paper offers an important “puzzle piece” for identifying what causes these disorders to develop.
Dr. Freedman notes that the paper offers an important “puzzle piece” for identifying what causes these disorders to develop. Dr. Birnbaum, Research Fellow at LIBD and lead author on the paper, explains the approach. “We scanned the literature to identify sets of genes that have been associated with various psychiatric illnesses and then analyzed their prenatal expression patterns using data from the LIBD BrainCloud™ database. We asked if the expression of these specific susceptibility gene sets were either more or less abundant in the prenatal brain than in the postnatal brain to test our hypothesis that glitches in gene regulation during early brain development lead to later behavioral symptoms of mental illness.”
The study is an attempt to understand how the complex genetic architecture of neurodevelopmental illness “is translated, not directly into clinical illness, but rather into pathological brain development that then forms the basis for what will later become illness,” Dr. Freedman states in his Year in Review commentary.