Anticipation

Michael O'Donovan, University of Wales College of Medicine, Cardiff, UK

Published online: July 2006

DOI: 10.1038/npg.els.0005228

The phenotype of many inherited disorders tends to become progressively more severe and/or be expressed at a younger age as it is transmitted to successive generations of a pedigree. This phenomenon is called anticipation and has been reported to occur widely in the principal functional psychoses (schizophrenia and bipolar disorder), although it is possible that these findings are attributable to sampling biases.

Keywords: age at onset; bipolar disorder; disease severity; repeat expansion detection; schizophrenia

Figure 1. Repeat expansion detection. (Figure reproduced with permission from Schalling et al. (1993)).
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 References
    Asherson P, Walsh C, Williams J, et al. (1994) Imprinting and anticipation – are they relevant to genetic studies of schizophrenia? British Journal of Psychiatry 164: 619–624.
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    Lindblad K, Nylander P-O, Zander C, et al. (1998) Two commonly expanded CAG/CTG repeat loci: involvement in affective disorders? Molecular Psychiatry 3: 405–410.
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 Further Reading
    Margolis RL, McInnis MG, Rosenblatt A and Ross CA (1999) Trinucleotide repeat expansion and neuropsychiatric disease. Archives of General Psychiatry 56: 1019–1031.
    book Morel BA (1857) Traite des Degenerescences. Paris: JB Bailliere.
    Mott FW (1910) Hereditary aspect of nervous and mental diseases. British Medical Journal 2: 1013–1020.
    Penrose LS (1948) The problem of anticipation in pedigrees of dystrophia myotonica. Annals of Eugenics 14: 125–132.
    Vincent JB, Paterson AD, Strong E, Petronis A and Kennedy JL (2000) The unstable trinucleotide repeat story of major psychosis. American Journal of Medical Genetics – Seminars in Medical Genetics 97: 77–97.

Related Sub-Topics:

Neurobiology of Disease | Genetics of Intelligence and Cognition | Mutational Mechanisms of Genetic Disease | Gene and Genome Structure and Organisation | Genomic Disorders | Inter-Individual Variation and Polymorphism
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Article Title: Anticipation
 
How to Cite close
O'Donovan, Michael(Jul 2006) Anticipation. In: eLS. John Wiley & Sons Ltd, Chichester. http://www.els.net [doi: 10.1038/npg.els.0005228]