ICS-INITIATIVE-MILLENNIUM-SCHIZOPHRENIA-CONSORTIUM - LINKAGE ANALYSISOF AFRICAN-AMERICAN PEDIGREES

The NIMH Genetics Initiative is a multi-site collaborative study desig ned to create a national resource for genetic studies of complex neuro psychiatric disorders. Schizophrenia pedigrees have been collected at three sites: Washington University, Columbia University, and Harvard U niversity. This article-one in a series that describes the results of a genome-wide scan with 459 short-tandem repeat (STR) markers for susc eptibility loci in the NIMH Genetics Initiative schizophrenia sample-p resents results for African-American pedigrees, The African-American s ample comprises 30 nuclear families and 98 subjects. Seventy-nine of t he family members were considered affected by virtue of having receive d a DSMIII-R diagnosis of schizophrenia (n = 71) or schizoaffective di sorder, depressed (n = 8). The families contained a total of 42 indepe ndent sib pairs. While no region demonstrated evidence of significant linkage using the criteria suggested by Lander and Kruglyak, several r egions, including chromosomes 6q16-6q24, 8pter-8q12, 9q32-9q34, and 15 p13-15q12, showed evidence consistent with linkage (P = 0.01-0.05), pr oviding independent support of findings reported in other studies. Mor eover, the fact that different genetic loci were identified in this an d in the European-American samples, lends credence to the notion that these genetic differences together with differences in environmental e xposures may contribute to the reported differences in disease prevale nce, severity, comorbidity, and course that has been observed in diffe rent racial groups in the United States and elsewhere. Am. J. Med. Gen et. (Neuropsychiatr. Genet.) 81: 282-289, 1998. (C) 1998 Wiley-Liss, I nc.