[Abstract Title]. - Society for Neuroscience

previously identified 17 genes with expression levels that correlate with anxiety behavior across
six inbred mouse strains in at least one of the seven studied brain regions. In the present study,
we tested their 13 known human homologues as candidate genes for human anxiety disorders
with a genetic association study.
Methods: We used an anxiety disorder study sample derived from a Finnish population-based
Health 2000 Survey. It consists of 321 patients and 653 carefully matched controls, all
interviewed using CIDI to obtain DSM-IV diagnoses of panic disorder, generalized anxiety
disorder, agoraphobia, social phobia, or phobia NOS. We genotyped altogether 208 SNPs (all
non-synonymous SNPs, SNPs that alter potential microRNA binding sites, and gap-filling SNPs
selected based on HapMap information) from the investigated anxiety candidate genes.
Results: Specific alleles and haplotypes of six of the examined genes revealed some evidence for
association (p ≤ 0.01). The most significant evidence for association to different anxiety disorder
subtypes were: p = 0.0009 to ALAD (delta-aminolevulinate dehydratase) in social phobia, p =
0.009 to DYNLL2 (dynein light chain 2) in generalized anxiety disorder, and p = 0.004 to PSAP
(prosaposin) in panic disorder. In addition, we examined trends in pointwise association across
individual genes and noticed that EPB41L4A was overrepresented among the top findings, with
a clear trend towards more significant p-values (rank test p=0.0001).
Conclusions: Our findings suggest that variants in these genes may predispose to specific human
anxiety disorders, although replication in other cohorts is needed. These results illustrate the
potential utility of cross-species approaches in identification of candidate genes for psychiatric
disorders.
Disclosures: I. Hovatta, None; J. Donner, None; S. Pirkola, None; L. Kananen, None; K.
Silander, None; J.D. Terwilliger, None; L. Peltonen, None; J. Lönnqvist, None.
Poster
256. Anxiety Disorders: Human Biomarkers
Time: Sunday, November 16, 2008, 1:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Program#/Poster#: 256.2/Z5
Topic: C.15.k. Anxiety disorders
Support: NIH MH069823
Title: Ventral Hippocampus and medial prefrontal cortex synchronize in theta range during
anxiety
Authors: *A. ADHIKARI 1 , R. HEN 2 , J. A. GORDON 2 ;
2 Psychiatry, 1 Columbia Univ., New York, NY