Risch

After I wrote in my Atlantic article about getting my serotonin transporter gene assayed (which revealed that I carry that gene's apparently more plastic short-short form), I started getting a lot of email â several a week â from readers asking how to have their SERT gene tested. This led to an interesting hunt. It was a hard question to answer. I couldn't just tell people to do what I did, for a psychiatric researcher/MD I'd known for years, who specializes in depression and serotonin, had done mine as a sort of favor to science and journalism. That researcher also stood by, had I needed…

Big psych news of the day is that a big JAMA study debunked the "depression gene" -- that is, this big new study (by Risch et alia, in JAMA, today) found that, contrary to a famous earlier big study (Caspi et alia, in Science, 2003), the short ("bad") form of a particular gene called 5-HTT does NOT make a person more vulnerable to depression. Or, to flip it:: Caspi 2003 had found that having a short version of 5-HTT, which affects processing of serotonin, put someone at more risk of depression if they experienced (as adults) repeated stressful life events. Risch 2009, crunching data from a…