¹Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation, Pharmacogenetics, Gaithersburg, USA

²Institute of Psychiatry, Section of Molecular Genetics, London, UK

³Departments of Psychiatry and Biology, University Hospital, Faculty of Medicine, University of Patras, Greece

⁴Division of Medical and Molecular Genetics, Guy's King's and St Thomas School of Medicine, London, UK

Correspondence to: Dr M H Polymeropoulos, Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation, Pharmacogenetics, 9 West Watkins Mill Road, Gaithersburg, MD 20878, USA. E-mail: mihael.polymeropoulos@pharma.novartis.com

Wolfram syndrome, a rare autosomal recessive neurodegenerative disorder, was originally described as a combination of familial juvenile-onset diabetes mellitus and optic atrophy. It was later demonstrated that Wolfram syndrome patients were highly prone to psychiatric disorders. Mutations in exon 8 of the Wolfram syndrome gene account for 88% of the patients with Wolfram syndrome. To examine whether the gene responsible for causing Wolfram syndrome is involved in psychiatric disorders, we screened exon 8 of the Wolfram syndrome gene for mutations in 119 patients with schizophrenia, one patient with schizoaffective disorder, 12 patients with bipolar disorder and 15 patients with major depression, using sequence analysis. In Wolfram syndrome patients, this gene has been shown to have primarily nonsense or frameshift mutations, which would result in a premature truncation of the protein. None of the psychiatric patients screened in this study carried these types of mutations. We identified, however, 24 new variations whose significance remains to be determined. Molecular Psychiatry (2001) 6, 39-43.

Wolfram syndrome gene; psychiatric diseases; polymorphism; mutation; variation; schizophrenia; schizoaffective disorder; bipolar disorder; major depression