Heritability and familiality of psychopathologic dimensions in Korean families with schizophrenia.

AIM: Categorical syndromes such as schizophrenia could be a combination of many continuous mental structure phenotypes including several personality development/degeneration dimensions. This study investigated the heritability and familiality of symptom check list (SCL) psychopathologic dimensions in Korean schizophrenia linkage disequilibrium families.

METHOD: We recruited 204 probands (with schizophrenia) with their parents and siblings whenever possible. We used the SCL questionnaire to measure psychopathologic dimensions. The heritability of symptomatic dimensions in 543 family members was estimated using Sequential Oligogenic Linkage Analysis Routines (SOLAR). Psychopathologic dimensions in the 543 family members were compared with those in 307 healthy unrelated controls to measure familiality on using analysis of variance (ANOVA) analysis.

RESULTS

Five of the nine SCL variables were significantly heritable and were included in the subsequent analyses. The three groups (control, unaffected first-degree relative, schizophrenia patient) were found to be significantly different with regard to the expected order of average group scores for all heritable dimensions.

CONCLUSION

Aberrations in several symptomatic dimensions could contribute to the complexity of schizophrenia syndrome as a result of genetic-environment coaction or interaction in spite of some limitations (recruited family, phenotyping).