Degree Name

MPH (Master of Public Health)

Program

Public Health

Date of Award

12-2011

Committee Chair or Co-Chairs

Kesheng Wang

Committee Members

James Anderson, Xuefeng Liu

Abstract

Bipolar disorder is a relatively common form of mental illness that depends strongly on genetic inheritance for expression. The author of this study has sought to evaluate whether the gender of subjects influences which genetic variants are associated with the disease. A portion of the cases from a previously published study were analyzed using PLINK software and the association of single-nucleotide polymorphisms was evaluated separately for all cases, for female subjects alone, and for male subjects alone. The results obtained for male subjects alone reached higher levels of statistical significance than when both genders were evaluated together or when female subjects were evaluated alone. The most significantly scoring polymorphisms were distinctly different for the 2 genders. In particular, a site downstream of the ion exchanger SLC24A3 and upstream of the Rab5-interacting protein RIN2 gene on chromosome 20 (rs6046396) yielded very high significance in men (p=3.91 X 10-9).

Document Type

Thesis - unrestricted

Copyright

Copyright by the authors.

Included in

Public Health Commons

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