Word: manically
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...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...
Usually beginning somewhere between the ages of 15 and 35, manic depression afflicts about 1 in every 100 people. Because it causes its victims to oscillate between two extreme emotional states, it is also known to psychiatrists as bipolar affective disorder. In the manic phase, victims become expansive and extravagant, are often unable to sleep or eat, and may talk incessantly. Some assume airs of grandeur. The depressive phase plunges them into hopelessness, loneliness and boundless guilt, feelings that sometimes lead to suicide...
...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...
...study published last week focused on one 81-member clan. Fourteen members had been diagnosed with manic depression and another five with other mental disorders. Thanks to unusual cooperation from the family, the researchers were able to obtain blood from each member and then isolate DNA from each sample. Using so-called restriction enzymes, they "cut" the DNA into segments. When they compared gene segments from manic depressives with those from normal family members, they found a discrepancy in a region of chromosome 11. Their conclusion: a gene or group of genes in or near this region confers a predisposition...
Does the same genetic defect play a role in all manic depression? Not necessarily. Two studies also published in last week's Nature revealed no link between the chromosome 11 site and manic depression in six non-Amish families prone to the disease. Still, these findings do not undermine the important discovery of a genetic basis for the ailment. Instead, observes NIMH Psychiatrist Sevilla Detera-Wadleigh, who led one of the other studies, they suggest that more than one gene may be involved in manic depression...