If you have ADHD, chances are higher that your siblings do, too. Estimates differ as to how strong the connection is, but the arrows point in the same direction: genetics helps determine someone’s risk for ADHD. Beyond that, we still have myriad questions and not many answers.
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Geneticist Ditte Demontis and her colleagues used data from more than 20,000 people with ADHD, comparing them to a control group of 35,000 people without an ADHD diagnosis. They found 304 points where tiny differences in DNA—like single letter swaps—were distributed across their two groups in a statistically telling way. If any of those variants were very close together, the researchers counted them as representing the same stretch of DNA, grouping them together into 12 important regions.
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There were correlations between the genetic risk for ADHD and a range of other conditions, including depression and anorexia. That ties in with the idea that genetic variation might be important in a way that plays out system-wide. Some of the genes they identified are also known to be involved in other neurological conditions, including speech and learning disabilities, depression, and schizophrenia.
This research is light-years away from anything that will immediately affect people with ADHD—like a genetic test or a medication. But that doesn’t make it useless. It’s just creating routes for additional research, rather than practical application.
Read full, original post: Large genetic study finds first genes connected with ADHD
