The Quality of Medication Treatment for Mental Disorders in the Department of Veterans Affairs and in Private-Sector Plans.

Objective: The quality of mental health care provided by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) was compared with care provided to a comparable population treated in the private sector.

The quality of mental health care for veterans of Operation Enduring Freedom/Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Background: Some Operation Enduring Freedom/Operation Iraqi Freedom (OEF/OIF) veterans experience serious mental health (MH) problems. As OEF/OIF soldiers leave active military duty, their growing numbers pose a challenge to the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) in delivering high-quality mental health/substance-use disorder (MH/SUD) care.

Objective: To determine whether the quality of MH/SUD care provided by the VA differs by OEF/OIF veteran status.

Care for veterans with mental and substance use disorders: good performance, but room to improve on many measures.

In 2006 the Department of Veterans Affairs commissioned the Altarum Institute and the RAND Corporation to do an evaluation of its mental health treatment system. We found that veterans with mental illness and substance use disorders represented 15.4 percent of all veterans using Veterans' Health Administration (VHA) services in 2007 and that they accounted for 32.

Elucidating the genetic architecture of familial schizophrenia using rare copy number variant and linkage scans.

To elucidate the genetic architecture of familial schizophrenia we combine linkage analysis with studies of fine-level chromosomal variation in families recruited from the Afrikaner population in South Africa. We demonstrate that individually rare inherited copy number variants (CNVs) are more frequent in cases with familial schizophrenia as compared to unaffected controls and affect almost exclusively genic regions. Interestingly, we find that while the prevalence of rare structural variants is similar in familial and sporadic cases, the type of variants is markedly different.

Nogo Receptor 1 (RTN4R) as a candidate gene for schizophrenia: analysis using human and mouse genetic approaches.

Background: NOGO Receptor 1 (RTN4R) regulates axonal growth, as well as axon regeneration after injury. The gene maps to the 22q11.2 schizophrenia susceptibility locus and is thus a strong functional and positional candidate gene.