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Sammanfattning

A challenge for environmentally oriented theories of mental illness etiology has been to delineate the mechanisms by which exposure to psychosocial stress changes neurobiological structure and function. One hypothesis is that epigenetic mechanisms play a role. The scientific literature was reviewed in order to assess the hypothesis that epigenetic changes induced by psychosocial stress are involved in severe mental illness (schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depression), with a focus on studies of DNA methylation in the brain using post-mortem samples. An array of DNA methylation changes has been reported in severe mental illness, but with large variability across studies. Most importantly, candidate gene studies of epigenetic alterations in severe mental illness generally have not focused on genes that are central to stress processing, and epigenome-wide association studies (EWAS) have not targeted epigenomes derived from brain regions that are central to stress-response systems. The available evidence currently does not allow for the evaluation of whether stress-induced epigenetic changes characterize severe mental illness.

MeSH