Bipolar disorder and the striatum: a novel target for therapeutics?

A study led by Ron Davis (The Scripps Research Institute, FL, USA) and published recently in Molecular Psychiatry has demonstrated that ensembles of genes within the striatum could be strongly associated with bipolar disorder (BD). BD is a heritable mental illness, presenting with impulsive and risk-taking behavior and affecting approximately 2.6% of the US adult population. Most modern BD research has been focused on the cortical brain regions, however the team believes they have reported the first transcriptome sequencing of the post-mortem human dorsal striatum in BD. "This is the first real study of gene expression in the striatum for...