Imaging genetics of mood disorders

Abstract

Mood disorders are highly heritable and have been linked to brain regions of emotion processing. Over the past few years, an enormous amount of imaging genetics studies has demonstrated the impact of risk genes on brain regions and systems of emotion processing in vivo in healthy subjects as well as in mood disorder patients. While sufficient evidence already exists for several monaminergic genes as well as for a few non-monoaminergic genes, such as brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) in healthy subjects, many others only have been investigated in single studies so far. Apart from these studies, the present review also covers imaging genetics studies applying more complex genetic disease models of mood disorders, such as epistasis and gene-environment interactions, and their impact on brain systems of emotion processing. This review attempts to provide a comprehensive overview of the rapidly growing field of imaging genetics studies in mood disorder research.

Copyright 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Figures

Fig. 1

Summary of the genetic impact of mood disorder risk genes on volumetric and BOLD measures in healthy subjects and mood disorder patients. BOLD, blood-oxygen level dependent. ○, only studies in mood disorder samples available; ●, only studies in healthy samples available; +, only gene–gene interaction reported; *, gene–environment interaction reported; three classes of color opacity display available evidence (from light to dark): 30% single study or support index