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What could be causing SNPs related to hyperactivity?

Posted by CCRodgers on 01 Dec 2008 at 00:12 GMT

The relationship between genetic polymorphisms and metabolic differences may greatly advance the understanding of hyperactive children. Interestingly, common ways to temporarily decrease hyperactive symptoms in children, such as exercise, prescribed amphetamines or stimulants of any kind, such as caffeine, all increase metabolism, suggesting that hyperactivity may be a temperature-related disorder. The CDC estimates that 4.4 million children between the ages of 4 and 17 have been diagnosed with ADHD by a medical professional. The American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual-IV, Text Revision (DSM-IV-TR) estimates that 4 and 7 percent of all children have ADHD. The real question is: When not inherited, what is causing this particular SNPs to become so common among children today?

RE: What could be causing SNPs related to hyperactivity?

ksuhre replied to CCRodgers on 12 Dec 2008 at 09:24 GMT

I would like to add two points to this post:

(1) The SNPs that are discussed in this paper are definitely inherited, and did not occur spontaneously. Their minor allele frequency is larger than 20%. So many identical mutations cannot appear by chance.

(2) As for the argument that ADHS may be temperature-related - the following paper by Chen et al. may be of great interest in this context:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.g...

This paper reports a genetic variation in the enzyme-coding gene for the carnitine palmitoyltransferase II(CPT II). The reported variant constitutes a predisposing factor for influenza-associated encephalopathy as a thermolabile phenotype.

This case parallels to some extend the FADS1-ADHS association reported in Gieger et al., as the genetic variation in CPT II associates with transiently elevated serum acylcarnitine ratios (C16:0 + C18:1)/C2 during high-grade fever.

Thus, the polymorphism of CPT II can be regarded as another "genetically determined metabotype".