Original articleThe Corticotropin-Releasing Hormone Gene and Behavioral Inhibition in Children at Risk for Panic Disorder
Section snippets
Participants
Families were recruited from a sample of 231 families who had participated in a study of children at risk for anxiety disorders conducted at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). Details of the study sample and behavioral assessments are provided elsewhere (Rosenbaum et al 2000; Smoller et al 2001). In the children-at-risk study, the proband was a parent who either had a history of treatment for panic disorder or major depression or who was a control with no history of major anxiety syndromes
LD Structure of the CRH Locus
In order to determine the LD relationships among SNPs in and around the CRH gene, markers were genotyped in a panel of 93 individuals from 12 CEPH pedigrees, as described in Methods. Fifty-five SNPs spanning a region of more than 200 kb encompassing the CRH gene were typed, including approximately 155 kb centromeric and 114 kb telomeric of the gene. Figure 1 displays the inter-marker LD (using the D’ statistic) for the 25 SNPs that passed quality control metrics and had a minor allele frequency
Discussion
Although one must always be cautious when interpreting a single study, our results are compelling for several reasons. CRH has been implicated in the neurobiology of anxiety-related behavior and anxious temperament by numerous physiological and genetic studies of experimental animal models (Bakshi and Kalin 2000). The temperamental phenotype BI has been identified as a familial and developmental risk factor for panic and phobic anxiety disorders. We observed associations between markers in and
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