The influence of psychiatric screening in healthy populations selection: a new study and meta-analysis of functional 5-HTTLPR and rs25531 polymorphisms and anxiety-related personality traits

BMC Psychiatry

Research Article

Riccardo Sartori¹  Catia Scassellati²  Cristian Bonvicini²  Alessandra Minelli²  Massimo Gennarelli³ 

[1] Department of Philosophy, Pedagogy, Psychology, University of Verona, Verona, Italy;Genetic Unit, I.R.C.C.S. "San Giovanni di Dio" - Fatebenefratelli, Brescia, Italy;Genetic Unit, I.R.C.C.S. "San Giovanni di Dio" - Fatebenefratelli, Brescia, Italy;Department of Biomedical Sciences and Biotechnologies, Biology and Genetic Division, University School of Medicine, Brescia, Italy;

关键词: Neuroticism;    Harm Avoidance;    5-HTTLPR;    rs25531;    meta-analysis;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-244X-11-50

 received in 2010-08-04, accepted in 2011-03-31,  发布年份 2011

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundA genetic liability for anxiety-related personality traits in healthy subjects has been associated with the functional serotonin transporter promoter polymorphism (5-HTTLPR), although the data are somewhat conflicting. Moreover, only one study has investigated the functional significance of the 5-HTTLPR/rs25531 haplotypes in relation to anxiety traits in healthy subjects. We tested whether the 5-HTTLPR polymorphism and the 5-HTTLPR/rs25531 haplotypes are linked to Harm Avoidance (HA) using an association study (STUDY I) and a meta-analytic approach (STUDY II).MethodsSTUDY I: A total of 287 unrelated Italian volunteers were screened for DSM-IV Axis I disorders and genotyped for the 5-HTTLPR and rs25531 (A/G) polymorphisms. Different functional haplotype combinations were also analyzed. STUDY II: A total of 44 studies were chosen for a meta-analysis of the putative association between 5-HTTLPR and anxiety-related personality traits.ResultsSTUDY I: In the whole sample of 287 volunteers, we found that the SS genotype and S'S' haplotypes were associated with higher scores on HA. However, because the screening assessed by Mini-International Neuropsychiatric Interview (M.I.N.I.) showed the presence of 55 volunteers affected by depression or anxiety disorders, we analyzed the two groups ("disordered" and "healthy") separately. The data obtained did indeed confirm that in the "healthy" group, the significant effects of the SS genotype and S'S' haplotypes were lost, but they remained in the "disordered" group. STUDY II: The results of the 5-HTTLPR meta-analysis with anxiety-related traits in the whole sample confirmed the association of the SS genotype with higher anxiety-related traits scores in Caucasoids; however, when we analyzed only those studies that used structured psychiatric screening, no association was found.ConclusionsThis study demonstrates the relevance to perform analyses on personality traits only in DSM-IV axis I disorder-free subjects. Furthermore, we did not find an association between functional serotonin transporter gene polymorphisms and anxiety traits in healthy subjects screened through a structured psychiatric interview.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Minelli et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2011. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.