As a subject of clinical diagnosis, anxiety may be chronic, for instance, in some types of personality disorder or in generalized anxiety disorder (GAD); in such cases, it is akin to a “trait.” In other instances, anxiety is a short-lived, noncontinuous, discrete symptom, for example, in panic disorder (PD) or in acute stress;

then it is a “state,” rather than a trait. Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical Anxiety comprises many phenotypes and clinical descriptions. It is routinely partitioned into disorders of general anxiety, panic, phobia, and in some classifications, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD); and the lifetime prevalence for the group of disorders has been estimated to be as high as 25%. 1 Even this classification does not go far to encompass the Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical complexity of anxiety, and hence the arduousness of the task of getting at its biological root. The success to date has not been overwhelming; however, some recent studies have provided more hope than was in the past thought to be realistic. OCD is sometimes classified with anxiety (eg, in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of

Mental Disorders [DSM]) and sometimes not (eg, in the International Statistical Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision [ICD10]). Attempts to unravel the genetics of OCD are numerous and would be best served in a treatise of their own, and so will not be included in this review. Since many genetic studies on anxiety have been performed on PD and, possibly as a direct buy Sorafenib result thereof, the Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical most enlightening results to date have been found for PD, a proportionate Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical amount of this review will concentrate on the findings in PD. The aim of this review is by no means to overstate

the role of genetics in anxiety, rather to highlight the evidence that exists for the role of genetics in anxiety. The term “complex trait” has been coined by geneticists Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical to refer to any phenotype that does not exhibit classic mcndclian recessive or dominant inheritance attributable to a single gene.7 In general, complexities arise when the simple correspondence between genotype and phenotype breaks down, because either the same genotype can result in different phenotypes (due to the effects of chance, incomplete penetrance, environment, or interactions with other genes), or different genotypes Idoxuridine can result in the same phenotype (eg, phenocopies, due to environmental or random causes). In fact, most traits of medical relevance, and particularly psychiatric disorders, do not follow simple mendelian inheritance. During the last decade, geneticists have taken up the challenge of the genetic dissection of complex traits. The usual path taken to the elucidation of the genetic basis of psychiatric and other complex disorders is becoming fairly routine. Before undertaking studies aimed at genetic dissection, particularly at the molecular or DNA level, one would ideally like to infer as much as possible about the genetic basis of the trait on the basis of the pattern of disease incidence in families and populations.