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Bipolar disorder is one of the most heritable psychiatric illnesses, but the involvement of multiple genes in most cases has made it difficult to characterize the importance of any particular candidate gene. Scientists in Australia took a step toward addressing this problem by examining genetic interactions, defined as situations in which the influence of two or more genes is greater than the simple additive effect of the genes.
In 65 extended pedigrees, 643 individuals had a full genome scan, and 285 had a structured diagnosis of bipolar I disorder, bipolar II disorder, schizoaffective disorder–manic type, or recurrent unipolar depression. The researchers used sophisticated statistical analyses, ignored genes that were close to each other, …