Genetics in psychiatry: Methods, clinical applications and future perspectives.

Psychiatric disorders and related traits have a demonstrated genetic component, with heritability estimated by twin studies generally between 80% and 40%. Their pathogenesis is complex and multi-determined: environmental factors interact with a polygenic architecture, making difficult the development of models able to stratify patients or predict mental health outcomes. Despite this difficult challenge, relevant progress has been made in the field of psychiatric genetics in recent years.

Precision medicine in mood disorders.

The choice of the most appropriate psychoactive medication for each of our patients is always a challenge. We can use more than 100 psychoactive drugs in the treatment of mood disorders, which can be prescribed either alone or in combination. Response and tolerability problems are common, and much trial and error is often needed before achieving a satisfactory outcome.

Clinical Correlates of Functional Motor Disorders: An Italian Multicenter Study.

Background: Functional motor disorders (FMDs) are abnormal movements that are significantly altered by distractive maneuvers and are incongruent with movement disorders seen in typical neurological diseases.

Objective: The objectives of this article are to (1) describe the clinical manifestations of FMDs, including nonmotor symptoms and occurrence of other functional neurological disorders (FND); and (2) to report the frequency of isolated and combined FMDs and their relationship with demographic and clinical variables.

Methods: For this multicenter, observational study, we enrolled consecutive outpatients with a definite diagnosis of FMDs attending 25 tertiary movement disorders centers in Italy.

Mild malformations of cortical development in sleep-related hypermotor epilepsy due to mutations.

Mutations in the sodium-activated potassium channel gene have been associated with nonlesional sleep-related hypermotor epilepsy (SHE). We report the co-occurrence of mild malformation of cortical development (mMCD) and mutations in four patients with SHE. Focal cortical dysplasia type I was neuropathologically diagnosed after epilepsy surgery in three unrelated MRI-negative patients, periventricular nodular heterotopia was detected in one patient by MRI.

Two novel truncating mutations broaden the spectrum of prion amyloidosis.

Truncating mutations in have been associated with heterogeneous phenotypes ranging from chronic diarrhea and neuropathy to dementia, either rapidly or slowly progressive. We identified novel stop-codon mutations (p.Y163X, p.