Essay: Genetic contribution to developing a major depressive disorder: Mendelian vs. Quantitative genetic influence?

Faassen, C.T. van (2016) Essay: Genetic contribution to developing a major depressive disorder: Mendelian vs. Quantitative genetic influence? Bachelor's Thesis, Biology.

Preview	Text Biol_BC_2016_TimvanFaassen.pdf - Published Version Download (810kB) | Preview
	Text Toestemming.pdf - Other Restricted to Backend only Download (588kB)

Abstract

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a disabling condition that negatively affects a person's family, work or school life, sleeping and eating habits, and general health. An increasing amount of the world’s population is affected by it and MDD is thought to be the first leading cause of disability adjusted life years (DALY) in 2030. Twin studies have shown that there is a strong genetic component to this disease. MDD is a very complex disease and it is the result of many different genes interacting with one another. Current genetic research is trying to elucidate the mechanism underlying this disease, but there are many problems along the way. This thesis aims to identify these problems and try to think of ways on how to overcome them. This will be done by giving examples on current and previous research for different genetic approaches, Single gene and many genes. The examples are to illustrate what the merits of both approaches are but also where the bottlenecks lie. In conclusion there are a couple of bottlenecks. The first and major bottleneck is the poor diagnostic currently on psychiatric diseases. More objective factors to measure MDD’s should be developed in order to box in this disease and to be able to compare humans to animals such as rodents. Another problem is the number of patients needed in order to find common variants using GWAS, large databases should be compiled combining all available patient data on MDD.

Item Type:	Thesis (Bachelor's Thesis)
Degree programme:	Biology
Thesis type:	Bachelor's Thesis
Language:	English
Date Deposited:	15 Feb 2018 08:24
Last Modified:	15 Feb 2018 08:24
URI:	https://fse.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/id/eprint/14439

Actions (login required)

View Item