Systematic Genetic Analysis of Phenomenology and Treatment Response in Mood Disorders

The primary goals of this work are: a) to establish a unique collection of mood disorder patients across the life cycle, including children, adults and geriatric patients, with well-defined medical co-morbidities and medication treatment outcomes at the University Hospitals Case Medical Center Department of Psychiatry; b) to establish a collection of nuclear families, including both mothers and fathers, of children diagnosed with mood disorders; c) to perform a systematic genetic analysis of the proposed sample repository to identify genes and genetic variants contributing to inter-patient variability in clinical phenotypes and treatment responses. Our primary hypothesis is that genetic variations may underlie individual variability in disease susceptibility, clinical phenotypes and treatment safety, tolerability, and effectiveness.