Psychosis-proneness correlates with expression levels of dopaminergic genes

Abstract

Psychosis-proneness or schizotypy is a personality organisation mirroring individual risk for schizophrenia-development. Believed to be a fully dimensional construct sharing considerable geno- and phenotypal variance with clinical schizophrenia, it has become an increasingly promising tool for basic psychosis-research. Although many studies show genetic commonalities between schizotypy and schizophrenia, changes in regulation of gene expression have never been examined in schizotypy before. We therefore extracted RNA from the blood, a valid surrogate for brain tissue, of a large sample of 67 healthy male volunteers and correlated the activities of all genes relevant for dopaminergic neurotransmission with the positive schizotypy-scale of the O-LIFE. We found significant negative correlations regarding the expression of the genes COMT, MAOB, DRD4, DRD5 and FOS, indicating that increased schizotypy coincides with higher levels of dopaminergic dysregulation on the mRNA-level. Considering the advantages of this method, we suggest that it be applied more often in fundamental psychosis-research.