Case-control association study of 65 candidate genes revealed a possible association of a SNP of HTR5A to be a factor susceptible to bipolar disease in Bulgarian population.
BACKGROUND
Bipolar affective disorder (BAD) is a psychiatric illness characterized by episodes of mania and depression. Although the etiology is not clear, epidemiological studies suggest it is a result of an interaction of genetic and environmental factors. Despite of enormous efforts and abundant studies conducted, none has yet been identified definitively a gene susceptible to bipolar disorder.


METHODS
Ninety-four Bulgarian patients diagnosed with bipolar disorder and 184 Bulgarian healthy individuals, were used for genotyping of 191 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) by TaqMan and/or Invader assays. Seventeen SNPs that revealed P value less than 0.05 in the first screening were genotyped using an additional independent set of samples, consisting of 78 BAD cases and 372 controls.


RESULTS
After applying the Bonferonni correction on genotyping results of 172 cases and 556 controls, only one SNP, rs1800883, in the HTR5A gene revealed a significant level of P value (P=0.000097; odds ratio=1.80 (95%CI, 1.27-2.54); corrected P=0.017).


CONCLUSIONS
Our findings suggest that HTR5A gene could play an important role in the pathogenesis of bipolar disorder in our population. However these findings should be viewed with caution and replication studies in other populations are necessary in support of these findings.
Yosifova
Adelina
A
Laboratory for International Alliance, RIKEN Center for Genomic Medicine, Tsurumi-ku, Yokohama, Japan.
Mushiroda
Taisei
T
Stoianov
Drozdstoi
D
Vazharova
Radoslava
R
Dimova
Ivanka
I
Karachanak
Sena
S
Zaharieva
Irina
I
Milanova
Vihra
V
Madjirova
Nadejda
N
Gerdjikov
Ivan
I
Tolev
Todor
T
Velkova
Stoyanka
S
Kirov
George
G
Owen
Michael J
MJ
O'Donovan
Michael C
MC
Toncheva
Draga
D
Nakamura
Yusuke
Y