The University of Florence is one of the contributors in an international research, published in Nature Genetics, which identified eight significant genetic markers for anorexia nervosa.
More than 200 scientists from 27 research centres in North America, Europe and Australia have performed DNA genomic analysis of nearly 17,000 patients with anorexia nervosa, compared with more than 55,000 healthy subjects (control samples): it is the largest study of anorexia nervosa known to date.
The University of Florence (Unifi) researchers who participated in the collaborative study of the Consortium of Psychiatric Genomics - this is the name of the global network - are Benedetta Nacmias and Sandro Sorbi (from the Department of Neurosciences, Psychology, Drug Research and Child Health) together with Valdo Ricca (Department of Health Sciences). In addition to Florence, researchers from the universities of Padua, Perugia, Pisa, Campania and Salerno contributed to the Italian part of the international team, led by Cynthia Bulik (University of North Carolina-USA and Karolinska Institutet-Stockholm). ["Genome-wide association study identifies eight risk loci and implicates metabo-psychiatric origins for anorexia nervosa" 'DOI: 10.1038 / s41588-019-0439-2]
“The study, of exceptional value for the size of the sample analysed, highlights that anorexia, a complex and severe disease, has both psychiatric and metabolic roots. The discovery of these new genetic markers helps us to better understand the biology of this pathology,” as Sandro Sorbi, director of the Specialization School in Neurology, and Benedetta Nacmias, professor of Neurology both at the University of Florence, explain.
“The survey - details Valdo Ricca, director of the Unifi Specialization School in Psychiatry - has allowed us to discover that anorexia nervosa has genetic correlations with some psychiatric disorders - such as obsessive-compulsive disorder and major depressive disorder - as well as sharing with these pathologies the metabolic traits and physical activity alteration.”
“The results of the investigation deepen and extend previous research done in 2017 and published in the American Journal of Psychiatry and suggest that attention to both metabolic and psychiatric aspects of the disease can guide more effective treatments in the future,” the Unifi researchers comment.
