Citation

Kalin NH. Am. J. Psychiatry 2023; 180(10): 699-702.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2023, American Psychiatric Association)

DOI

10.1176/appi.ajp.20230631

PMID

37777853

Abstract

This issue of the Journal brings together papers that further our understanding of the influences of stress, heritability, and genetic factors mediating the development of depression, PTSD, and the risk to engage in suicidal behavior. The issue begins with two genetic research studies, one of which is focused on the heritability of depression, the other on the genetics of suicidal behavior. In the first study, the authors use data from a very large Swedish sample to understand how patterns of heritability inform an understanding of the heterogenous presentation of major depression. The other, in the largest sample analyzed to date, combines GWAS data from two large cohorts to identify genetic variation that is associated with suicidal behavior. Another article focused on PTSD and major depressive disorder (MDD) uses state-of-the-art molecular techniques such as single nuclear RNA sequencing to characterize gene expression alterations in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in brains from individuals with these disorders. Last, we feature two studies that address the impacts of stress on the development of negative affect and depressive symptoms. The first uses data from a large group of children to characterize how neurodevelopmental traits interact with social stressors to affect the development of depressive symptoms during adolescence and early adulthood. The second examines the impact of stress during pregnancy on the development of individual differences in infants’ negative affect and resting state functional connectivity between the amygdala and such regions as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the anterior insula.

To better understand how heritability relates to the marked heterogeneity in the presentation of major depression, Nguyen and colleagues (1) used a sibling-based design to analyze data from 1.5 million individuals in the Swedish registry. In contrast to many other studies, an important feature of this study was that diagnosis of MDD had to be made by...

Language: en

Keywords

Humans; Risk Factors; Suicidal Ideation; Suicide, Attempted; PTSD; suicide; Stress; depressive disorders; *Suicide; *Stress Disorders, Post-Traumatic/genetics; Depression/genetics; genetics/genomics; Suicide and Self-Harm