Association study of the adrenergic receptors and childhood‐onset mood disorders in Hungarian families

The adrenergic system has been implicated in the etiology of depression based on a number of lines of evidence, particularly, the mechanism of some classes of antidepressants which increase the synaptic levels of norepinephrine. Further, several genome scans for mood disorders, both unipolar and bipolar, have indicated linkage to the chromosomal regions of 5q23–q33.3, 8p12–p11.2, 4p16, and 10q24–q26, the location of the adrenergic receptors α1B (ADRA1B), β3 (ADRB3), α2C (ADRA2C), α2A (ADRA2A), and β1 (ADRB1). In this manuscript, we report on the relationship of the adrenergic receptors and depression using a family based association approach and 189 families (223 affected children) with childhood‐onset mood disorder (COMD) collected in Hungary. We found no significant evidence for an association with any of the 24 markers, in total, tested across these genes using single marker analysis or haplotypes of markers across these genes. The results in the present sample indicate that these nine genes are unlikely to be major susceptibility genes contributing to COMD. © 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.