Word: egeland
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Dates: during 1987-1987
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...Amish of Lancaster County, Pa. Rarer still is a flamboyant personality, a braggart, a show-off or, at the other extreme, someone who is deeply depressed or suicidal. In this community of quiet-spoken, humble pacifists, such behavior "really stands out against the social landscape," observes Medical Sociologist Janice Egeland, who has spent more than 25 years among the Old Order Amish, as the group is formally known. When it does occur, the Amish often have an explanation: "Siss im blut," they say; the peculiar behavior is "in the blood...
Last week Egeland, who is from the University of Miami School of Medicine, and a group of scientists at Yale and M.I.T. confirmed that traditional Amish explanation. By employing the tools of molecular biology along with the handwritten genealogical records of Amish families, they showed that the mental disorder known as manic depression is indeed at least partly a matter of bloodlines. Their report, published in the journal Nature, conclusively linked cases of manic depression in an Amish family to genes in a specific region of human chromosome 11. "This is the first demonstration of a possible genetic basis...
Though manic depression is no more common among the Amish than other groups, Egeland's research turned up 32 active cases. All proved to have family histories of the disease going back several generations. Curiously, all of the 26 suicides documented in the community since 1880 occurred in just four of these families...
...Egeland hopes for a more immediate benefit from her work. "Too often," she says, "personal embarrassment and social stigma are associated with an illness whose cause is beyond the control of the individual." That stigma should be lessened and more people should be encouraged to seek treatment now that scientists have confirmed the source of manic depression can indeed be im blut...