Lieber Institute for Brain Development Publication Chosen for The American Journal of Psychiatry Year in Review

BALTIMORE, Dec. 23, 2014 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Robert Freedman, M.D., editor of the American Journal of Psychiatry (AJP) has selected a paper by Rebecca Birnbaum, M.D., and colleagues at the Lieber Institute for Brain Development (LIBD), as a noteworthy paper of 2014 in a year-end review, featuring the paper as "particularly interesting and important." The paper, published in AJP in July, reports findings from an investigation as to whether the prenatal expression of specific psychiatric disease-associated genes may 'kick start' atypical brain development that can lead to neurodevelopmental disorders including autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and schizophrenia. Dr. Freedman notes that the paper offers an important "puzzle piece" for identifying what causes these disorders to develop.

Dr. Birnbaum, Research Fellow at LIBD and lead author on the paper, explains the approach. "We scanned the literature to identify sets of genes that have been associated with various psychiatric illnesses and then analyzed their prenatal expression patterns using data from the LIBD BrainCloud™ database. We asked if the expression of these specific susceptibility gene sets were either more or less abundant in the prenatal brain than in the postnatal brain to test our hypothesis that glitches in gene regulation during early brain development lead to later behavioral symptoms of mental illness."

The study is an attempt to understand how the complex genetic architecture of neurodevelopmental illness "is translated, not directly into clinical illness, but rather into pathological brain development that then forms the basis for what will later become illness," Dr. Freedman states in his Year in Review commentary. 

Daniel R. Weinberger, M.D., Director and CEO of LIBD says that the team is seeking to "create the roadmap for brain development. We are focused on the question of how these illnesses start at the earliest possible stages so that we will be able to develop early intervention and even preventive strategies."

The LIBD BrainCloud™ database is freely accessible for further study and analyses.

About LIBD
The mission of the Lieber Institute for Brain Development is to translate the understanding of basic genetic and molecular mechanisms of schizophrenia and related developmental brain disorders into clinical advances that change the lives of affected individuals. LIBD is an independent, not-for-profit 501(c)(3) organization and a Maryland tax-exempt medical research institution affiliated with the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Reference: Birnbaum R, Jaffe AE, Hyde TM, Kleinman JE, Weinberger DR. Prenatal expression patterns of genes associated with neuropsychiatric disorders. American Journal of Psychiatry 2014; 171:758–767.

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SOURCE Lieber Institute for Brain Development

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