Genetics of Severe Personality Disorder and Mental Illness
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Genetics of Severe Personality Disorder and Mental Illness
IRAS ID
177413
Contact name
Anna Need
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Imperial College London
Duration of Study in the UK
5 years, 0 months, 1 days
Research summary
The goal of this project is to apply genetic analysis to patients in Broadmoor Hospital with severe mental disorders and identify genetic variants that may be contributing to or causing the mental disorders.
Recent genetic discoveries have identified a number of candidate genes, as well as mutation types, that are more common in patients with mental disorders such as autism and schizophrenia and epilepsy. In some cases, these identified mutations have indicated new treatments that would not otherwise have been tried and that have led to remarkable improvement in symptoms. Our hypothesis is that some Broadmoor patients with a severe mental disorder will have highly penetrant predisposing genetic variants that may lead to specific genetic diagnoses for the affected individuals, novel treatment options and/or insight into mental illness and personality disorders in general.
In this study, we will identify Broadmoor patients that are felt to have very severe forms of mental disorder, with early onset, no obvious environmental explanation, and a family history concordant with the possibility of a single genetic cause. We will collect DNA, family history and clinical history from them and, where possible, their parents and siblings. We will then perform genetic analyses techniques, primarily exome sequencing, to search for rare genetic variants that are likely to be contributing to their mental disorder(s).REC name
London - Queen Square Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
15/LO/1459
Date of REC Opinion
23 Sep 2015
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion