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Fooling Mother Nature: Epigenetics and Novel Treatments for Psychiatric Disorders

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2014

Stephen M. Stahl
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Extract

Modern formulations of psychiatric disorders hypothesize that mother nature goes awry, causing both genetic and epigenetic disease actions. Genetic disease actions are the consequences of naturally inherited risk genes that have an altered sequence of DNA. This altered DNA sequence theoretically leads to the production of altered gene products in neurons, causing inefficient information processing in various brain circuits, and biasing those circuits towards developing symptoms of a mental illness. Epigenetic disease actions are theorized either to activate risk genes to make an altered gene product or to activate normal genes to make normal gene products but at the wrong time. Epigenetic disease mechanisms theoretically turn normal genes into risk genes by causing normal genes to be expressed in neurons when these genes should be silenced or by causing normal genes to be silenced when they should be expressed.

Type
Trends in Psychopharmacology
Information
CNS Spectrums , Volume 15 , Issue 6 , June 2010 , pp. 358 - 366
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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