Workshop report
Workshop report
PsyRING staff, Professor Bob Hunter (Clinical Director) and Dr Catherine Winchester (Team Leader, Molecular Biology and Genetics) attended the 14th Biennial Winter Workshop on schizophrenia and bipolar disorders in Montreux, Switzerland, 3rd-7th February 2008.
Bob presented data from the Scottish Schizophrenia Outcomes Study (SSOS); the SSOS cohort of over 1000 participants with schizophrenia were studied over 4 years.
Poster 396: Avon Mental health measure: A useful patient-reported needs assessment measure.
Good clinical information is essential for biological studies in psychiatry. Patient-reported assessments are a relatively neglected area but the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has now issued guidance on the use of Patient-reported Outcomes (PROs) in clinical trials. Although self-report assessment scales are used in psychiatry, use in psychoses has been limited given concerns about the impact on assessments of positive symptoms, cognitive impairment and reduced insight. We reported on the utility of the Avon Mental Health Measure (Avon), a self-report measure, in a large longitudinal study of schizophrenia.
Catherine presented data on a case-control association study using DNA from two Caucasian populations, including a large cohort collected from the West of Scotland.
Poster 179: Chromosome 8p21 genes – how important are they in predisposition to schizophrenia?
Genes were selected from chromosome 8p21, a region of the human genome previously shown to be associated with schizophrenia by linkage and association studies. Tagged SNPs were selected for each gene based on haplotype block patterns
using the HapMap project and allele frequency (MAF>20%) (ABI SNPBrowser and
dbSNP) and were genotyped using TaqMan technology. Preliminary data suggest a modest association with a SNP in the 3’UTR of the neurodevelopmental gene, DPYSL2.