Molecular Signatures of Major Depression

• DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2015.03.008
• Publication Date: 2015-04-25T18:30:12Z
• Authors: Na Cai; Simon Chang; Yihan Li; Qibin Li; Jingchu Hu; Jieqin Liang; Li Song; Warren Kretzschmar; Xiangchao Gan; Jerome Nicod; Margarita Rivera; Hong Deng; Bo Du; Keqing Li; Wenhu Sang; Jingfang Gao; Shugui Gao; Baowei Ha; Hung-Yao Ho; Chunmei Hu; Jian Hu; Zhenfei Hu; Guoping Huang; Guoqing Jiang; Tao Jiang; Wei Jin; Gongying Li; Kan Li; Yi Li; Yingrui Li; Youhui Li; Yu-Ting Lin; Lanfen Liu; Tiebang Liu; Ying Liu; Yuan Liu; Yao Lu; Luxian Lv; Huaqing Meng; Puyi Qian; Hong Sang; Jianhua Shen; Jianguo Shi; Jing Sun; Ming Tao; Gang Wang; Guangbiao Wang; Jian Wang; Linmao Wang; Xueyi Wang; Xumei Wang; Huanming Yang; Lijun Yang; Ye Yin; Jinbei Zhang; Kerang Zhang; Ning Sun; Wei Zhang; Xiuqing Zhang; Zhen Zhang; Hui Zhong; Gerome Breen; Jun Wang; Jonathan Marchini; Yiping Chen; Qi Xu; Xun Xu; Richard Mott; Guo-Jen Huang; Kenneth Kendler; Jonathan Flint
• Keywords: Depression

Adversity, particularly in early life, can cause illness. Clues to the responsible mechanisms may lie with discovery of molecular signatures stress, some which include alterations an individual's somatic genome. Here, using genome sequences from 11,670 women, we observed a highly significant association between stress-related disease, major depression, and amount mtDNA (p = 9.00 × 10(-42), odds ratio 1.33 [95% confidence interval [CI] 1.29-1.37]) telomere length 2.84 10(-14), 0.85 CI 0.81-0.89]). While both were associated adverse life events, conditional regression analyses showed changes contingent on depressed state. We tested this hypothesis experiments mice, demonstrating that stress causes changes, are partly reversible be elicited by administration corticosterone. Together, these results demonstrate consequences entering These findings identify increased amounts as marker MD have important implications for understanding how disease.