Week 3 Post 2

One section that I found very interesting in chapter 3 is the section about genetic testing for psychological disorders. The majority of the information in this section are facts that I was not aware of and have never learned about before. The book explains that psychological disorders are multifactorial and that everyone is vulnerable to some inherited conditions. Although genes increase your vulnerability, the environment has a large influence as well. For schizophrenia, it states that if one monozygotic twin has schizophrenia, the other is likely to develop a psychological disorder. If a dyzygotic twin has schizophrenia, the risk is much lower that the other will develop a disorder. If both parents have schizophrenia, twenty-seven percent of their children develop it. If one parent has the disorder, seven percent of their children will as well. These conclusive results demonstrate the idea that the disorder is not strictly genetic. Some of the environmental causes of the disease are under-nutrition of the mother during pregnancy, birth in the summer, use of psychoactive drugs in adolescence, emigration to another country as a young adult, and family emotionality during adulthood. Many genes that increase susceptibility to the disorder remain to be found. Until I read this section of the chapter, I did not realize that genes influence the probability of developing schizophrenia to the extent that they do.  I assumed that one's environment had the greatest impact in one's vulnerability to the disease so I was very intrigued by these statistics.