The latest findings of postmortem brain research in psychiatric disease

Abstract

In 2014, the genome‐wide association study (GWAS) analysis using a largest sample set of 36,989 subjects with schizophrenia and 113,075 controls specified 108 common genetic variants that altered the risk for onset of schizophrenia and the next generation sequencing (NGS) technologies also identified rare and de novo mutations which were associated with risk of schizophrenia. Despite recent these great advances, the precise molecular mechanisms underlying schizophrenia and other psychiatric diseases have not been clarified. Considering the brain specific genome polymorphism such as transcriptional changes, epigenetic modifications and de novo mutations, using human brain tissue is essential to understand molecular pathophysiology of schizophrenia or bipolar disorders. Since 1997 we have managed the systematic postmortem brain bank on psychiatric diseases specializes in schizophrenia for the first time in Japan in order to understand and cure psychiatric diseases and currently maintains 55 brain tissue resources. Recent several postmortem studies including our ones adopted “genetic neuropathology and provided unique and insights into underlying genetic and molecular mechanisms of schizophrenia. In this article, we show the latest findings of postmortem brain research in psychiatric disease focusing on the results of our genetic neuropathology and co‐research with other institutes using collected postmortem brain samples.