Barking up the Right Tree: A Conversation with Psychiatrist Steven Hamilton
One of the many characteristics of MD-PhDs I admire is their honesty in the face of scientific mystery.
Psychiatrist and geneticist Steven Hamilton, MD, PhD — a lover of crime fiction, as it turns out — freely admits that when it comes to understanding how antidepressants work, no one has the answer — at least not yet.
But there are clues. And those clues likely lie in the genes that influence our varying response to different antidepressants. Not surprisingly, then, when Hamilton is not spending time seeing patients, he and his research colleagues are probing the human genome, searching for connections between heredity, psychiatric disorders and clinical outcomes. The goal: common genetic variations.
Steven Hamilton
One of the more common psychiatric disorders — popularly known as panic disorder — entered the lexicon around 1980. Panic attacks, which certainly must have been around for eons, seem to run in families, suggesting a strong genetic context. And indeed, Hamilton’s lab has uncovered a malfunctioning relationship between a class of proteins and their cell receptors that could predispose some to the disorder.
The unexpected twist is that studies in dogs with anxiety disorders, especially the jumpy breed known as the border collie, are pointing the way to where these genes might reside in humans. It’s a canine success story — different, of course, from those Hamilton heard from schizophrenic patients when he was earning his medical degree. Those stories of suffering and resilience changed his career. Now he hopes to change lives.
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Related Links
- UCSF Researcher Tracks Genes that Predict Response to Antidepressants
- UCSF Today, June 15, 2007
- Dogs Guide Search for Genes in Panic and Anxiety
- UCSF Today, June 25, 2007