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Tracy Hampton, PhD

JAMA. 2008;299(17):2017.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

A number of rare genetic mutations may contribute to schizophrenia, according to researchers from multiple institutions, including the University of Washington in Seattle; the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Cold Spring Harbor, NY; the University of California in Los Angeles; and the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md (Walsh T et al. Science. 10.1126/science.1155174 [published online ahead of print March 27, 2008]).

The investigators discovered that some mutations that contribute to schizophrenia are so rare that they are specific to just one patient or family, but they are individually powerful.

The researchers compared genomic DNA from 150 persons with schizophrenia and 268 healthy individuals. They found that the frequency of multiple individually rare duplications or deletions of DNA sequences among those with the disorder was more than triple that of controls (15% vs 5%). These mutations occurred even more frequently among individuals with schizophrenia that . . . [Full Text of this Article]