Based on heredity, five groups of mental health disorders were found

Mental health the genetic risk factors of disorders are common to different disorders, reveals a study published in the journal Nature on Wednesday major research.

The study went through the genomes of more than a million people with psychiatric disorders and looked at their genes in relation to 14 diagnoses.

In the light of the results, the disorders classified as separate in the diagnosis manuals formed five groups, each of which has a common genetic background.

Based on heredity, the main groups were: obsessive-compulsive disorder, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, adhd and autism, depression and anxiety, and drug addictions.

The genetic backgrounds of depression and anxiety on the one hand and schizophrenia and bipolar disorder on the other were particularly strongly overlapping.

Open has been that different mental health disorders often occur together and that they have a common genetic background. However, the number of separate diagnoses has swelled in disease classifications, when they have been separated and named mainly according to symptoms.

The research team assesses in Nature that their results help to understand the biological side of the disorders.

“We give separate name tags to things that are biologically not very separate”, explains the group’s researcher Andrew Grotzinger from the University of Boulder, Colorado, USA in New Scientist magazine.

He compares the practice to doctors giving the same patient separate diagnoses of a runny nose, cough and sore throat.

Grotzinger thinks her group’s result could be encouraging for people diagnosed with multiple psychiatric disorders. They may have felt that there is a lot wrong with them, but in light of the research, the underlying cause of the different diagnoses may be the same.

In the previous ones studies have found a p-factor that predicts general susceptibility to disorders. In the new study, the P factor was especially associated with depression and anxiety, as well as traits such as neuroticism, stress sensitivity and loneliness.

The results fit the previous notion that the p-factor mainly reflects a tendency towards negative emotional states.

However, in light of the results, the p-factor alone is not sufficient to explain the biological background of mental health disorders.

Some gene forms did combine with all 14 disorders and few gene forms only with one disorder.

The results suggest that the genetic factors shared by the disorders affect early brain development.

Most of the participants in the study were people from a European background. In further research, other population groups should also be considered, the research group writes.