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Exclusion of expansion of 50 CAG/CTG trinucleotide repeats in bipolar disorder
1Division of Psychological Medicine, University of Wales College of Medicine, Cardiff, Wales. wpcmod@Cardiff.ac.uk
Objective:
The purpose of this study was to identify the specific expanded CAG/CTG trinucleotide repeat associated with bipolar disorder.
Method:
The study employed an efficient multistage approach for using a genomic CAG/CTG screening set.
Results:
The authors found no evidence of expanded repeats at 43 polymorphic autosomal loci and seven X chromosomal loci. Secondary screening was pursued at the only locus that contained a large allele (37 repeats) in the primary screening. No association was found between allele size and diagnostic status.
Conclusions:
It is highly unlikely that expansions in repeat size at any of the 50 candidate trinucleotide repeat loci examined are responsible for the association between expanded CAG/ CTG repeats and bipolar disorder. However, although the authors prioritized the repeats that were a priori most likely to be involved, the study does not reject the more general hypothesis that expanded CAG/CTG repeats are implicated in the pathogenesis of bipolar disorder.