1. DNA methylation pattern of gene promoters of major neurotransmitter systems in older patients with schizophrenia with severe and mild cognitive impairment
- Author
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Ana Escanilla, Nadia Ashour, Santiago Ropero, Manuel Algora Weber, Raúl Alelú-Paz, Alfonso Monje, Carmen Guerrero Márquez, and Ana González-Corpas
- Subjects
medicine.medical_specialty ,medicine.diagnostic_test ,business.industry ,Epigenetics of schizophrenia ,Cognition ,Methylation ,medicine.disease ,Bioinformatics ,Psychiatry and Mental health ,Schizophrenia ,DNA methylation ,Medicine ,Epigenetics ,Neuropsychological assessment ,Geriatrics and Gerontology ,medicine.symptom ,business ,Psychiatry ,Cognitive deficit - Abstract
Objective To analyze, in older patients with schizophrenia, the methylation status of a set of genes associated with the pathophysiology of the disorder but including anatomical, clinical, and cognitive criteria in the experimental design that, in conjunction with the epigenetic status of specific genes, allows us to derive an integrative model. Method This study included 29 human brain samples from older schizophrenic patients with severe and mild cognitive impairment. We administered a comprehensive battery of neurocognitive tests to determine the size of the impairment across different cognitive domains. We focused our study on the analysis of the methylation pattern of 19 genes of major neurotransmitter systems using methylation-specific PCR and bisulfite genomic sequencing. Results Our results highlight an absence of hypermethylation and hypomethylation in older patients with schizophrenia and in healthy controls, irrespective of the degree of the cognitive deficit measured in the neuropsychological assessment (Fisher's exact test; p
- Published
- 2014