Characterization of gene expression profiles in children and adolescents at risk for mental disorders

Abstract

Neuropsychiatric disorders are the main cause of years lost because of disability in the worldwide young people. Many of these disorders present a high heritability, suggeting that the genome contains a large amount of information with a diagnosis potential. However, polygenic nature of these diseases, added to the influence of environmental factors makes it difficult to explore this information. Mental disorders and early environmental factors (such as neglect and abuse) appear to alter the expression of certain genes, as well as genetic variants. The aim of this study is to identify gene expression changes in blood of children and adolescents at risk for mental disorders after a 3 year folow-up. For this we will select 120 children/adolescents from the INPD cohort that have the baseline and the 3-year follow-up data, and we expect to divide them into four groups, based on the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL): 1) subjects without psychopathology in the baseline, but with symptoms after 3 years (incident group); 2) subjects without psychopathology and that continued to be healthy (control group); 3) subjects with psychopathology in the baseline and that continued with symptoms (persistent group); 4) subjects with psychopatology, but that were healthy after 3 years (remitted group). Blood was collected from all participants and we are currently performing RNA extraction and analyzing the clinical data to try to fit them into these groups to perform gene expression analysis using Illumina HT12 microarrays (which targets more than 47,000 probes). Early environmental factors, such as abuse, will also be correlated with gene expression. We intend to help identify risk factors for mental disorders in order to act in the early prevention and diagnosis. (AU)