西亚试剂：Written in the genes?

There is evidence that genetics influences a person’s suicide risk. For instance, biological relatives of adopted children who kill themselves are several times more likely to take their lives than the general population2.

Fabrice Jollant, a psychiatrist at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, suggests that this genetic influence is related to impulsivity and flawed judgement, rather than a specific mental illness. He has found that close relatives of people who killed themselves were more impulsive than a control group when playing a gambling game designed to test decision-making3. “It seems that this is something transmitted,” Jollant says.

Other researchers are seeking biomarkers that would allow clinicians to spot people most at risk of suicide. Alexander Niculescu, a psychiatrist at Indiana University in Indianapolis, and his colleagues have identified a set of six genes whose expression is altered in the blood of people who have killed themselves4. The team has found that combining these biomarkers with data from an app that tracks mood and risk factors can predict, with more than 90% accuracy, whether people with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia will eventually be hospitalized for a suicide attempt.4

And Mann is using positron emission tomography to track the best-studied biomarker, for the signalling molecule serotonin, in the brains of people who have attempted suicide5. Their altered serotonin patterns are similar to those seen after death in the brains of those who have killed themselves, says Mann.

Although serotonin levels are altered in people with depression, Mann has found differences between people who attempt suicide and those who are depressed but have no history of suicide attempts. He has also shown that serotonin levels are altered to a greater degree in those who make more serious suicide attempts — such as taking an entire bottle of painkillers — than in those whose attempts are less drastic6.

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