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Genetics overview

When a gene is associated with an illness, ‘typical’ inheritance patterns mean that a person carrying that gene will be affected by the illness, and the gene may be passed down to any offspring. However, schizophrenia is appearing to be much more complex. Hundreds of genes have been linked to schizophrenia and these genes do not appear to follow typical patterns of inheritance across generations. Moreover, the additional influence of environmental factors significantly complicates the identification of susceptibility genes. This suggests that a susceptibility to schizophrenia may involve associations with multiple genes which interact with each other, and with the environment, to result in schizophrenia.

The sheer volume of information available has lead to the development of a website dedicated to compiling all the existing evidence for schizophrenia susceptibility genes. SchizophreniaGene (www.szgene.org) aims to collate the evidence for all genes and polymorphisms that have been implicated in schizophrenia, performing meta-analyses where possible to assess the strength of the evidence for each gene and its polymorphisms. Therefore, information on individual genes are not included in the Schizophrenia Library. Please see the Genetics in schizophrenia factsheet PDF (below) for general information on genetics and how to use the SchizophreniaGene website. There is no technical table for this topic.

August 2020

Last updated at: 4:37 am, 1st September 2020
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Fact Sheet

NeuRA Libraries

Title Colour Legend:
Green - Topic summary is available.
Orange - Topic summary is being compiled.
Red - Topic summary has no current systematic review available.