Research ReportA Neuregulin 1 Variant Is Associated with Increased Lateral Ventricle Volume in Patients with First-Episode Schizophrenia
Section snippets
Subjects
The subjects formed part of a large prospective longitudinal study on first-episode nonaffective psychosis (Programa Asistencial Fases Iniciales de Psicosis [PAFIP]) (32). Only those patients with a DSM-IV diagnosis of schizophrenia 6 months after inclusion who had had genomic DNA extracted and had undergone MRI scans were included in this study (n = 95). Gender distribution was 59 male subjects (62.1%) and 36 female subjects (37.9%). Mean age of onset in our sample was 27.7 years (SD = 7.9),
Results
The number of patients from each genotype group did not significantly deviate from Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium for any of the three SNPs. The comparisons across the three genotype groups of SNP8NRG243177 among patients regarding sociodemographic and clinical characteristics are presented in Table 1, showing that these groups did not significantly differ in any of the variables, including symptom severity. Intracranial volume showed a highly significant correlation with lateral ventricle volumes
Discussion
We found a significant association between lateral ventricle volume and the NRG1 SNP8NRG243177, whereby those patients carrying the at-risk T allele/s presented substantially enlarged lateral ventricles, and this occurred in an allele copy number-dependent fashion (Figure 1). Carriers of the T allele had a 31.3% greater volume of lateral ventricles than patients homozygous for the C allele. Interestingly, patients homozygous for the C allele had a lateral ventricle volume similar to that of the
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