Genetics and Brain Transcriptomics of Completed Suicide

What is it about?

Suicide is a public health tragedy, now worsened by the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, and a complex, rarely accessible behavioral phenotype to investigate; dissecting the underlying biology may facilitate prevention. In a large brain dataset, we studied suicide by parsing the method chosen in an effort to unravel the biology of the frame of mind ultimately generating this unique behavior. We found that suicides by violent methods differ both at transcriptomic and genomic level from other suicides and from patients with same diagnosis, and are more similar to neurotypicals. The etiopathogenesis of this phenotype is less dependent on genetic risk for conventional psychiatric disorders and associated with altered G protein-coupled purinergic signaling, in the context of a certain energy metabolism in mitochondria.

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