Grant: Fellowship - PA: Clinical Research

Many clinical and metabolic genetic syndromes are known to present with psychiatric disorders or features. While much of ongoing psychiatric genetic research has been dedicated to the identification and characterization of genes involved in psychiatric disease, little research has been done to determine the extent to which clinical and metabolic genetic syndromes contribute to the psychiatric disease load in the population. Significantly, many of these conditions require surveillance for other, sometimes preventable or treatable, clinical manifestations, such as hormonal disturbances, heart disease, or neurodegenerative processes. Additionally, many metabolic conditions are treatable by adjustments in diet, medication and/or enzyme replacement therapy. The shorter-term goals of this study will be to identify the prevalence of clinical and metabolic genetic syndromes amongst large populations of psychiatric patients, with or without secondary diagnoses, allowing insight into the underlying disease-causing mechanisms of psychiatric disorders. This would lead longer-term to the development and refinement of diagnostic, management, surveillance and therapeutic protocols for the assessment of such patients, the characterization of clinical features amongst groups of patients found to have underlying genetic syndromes, as well as the education of primary care physicians, such as family physicians, psychiatrists and neurologists, so that appropriate and timely referrals can be made in the future. This would contribute to the improvement of physical and mental health outcomes, and ultimately to a better use of health care resources.