King Faisal Specialist Hospital & Research Center in
Riyadh recently announced that a research team has succeeded in identifying 35 new genes
related to children’s mental disorders.
The team conducted a first-of-its-kind research study that
compared the genome diagnosis approach to the more traditional medicinal
diagnosis, using more than 300 Saudi families with one child or more suffering
from mental disorder, retardation of acquiring mental skills or autism. The
results of the study were published in Molecular Psychiatry Magazine — an
influential scientific journal in the world of neuropsychological disorders.
In the study, the researchers found that the genome
diagnosis approach identified real disease with no error in 74 percent of
cases, while the traditional method only diagnosed real disease in 16 percent
of cases — and with a 30 percent rate of error.
Professor Fowzan Al Kuraya, senior clinical scientist and
head of developmental genetics laboratory at King Faisal Specialist Hospital
and Research Centre in Riyadh, noted that while there have been studies on the
accuracy of the genome approach before, this was the first study to directly
compare it to the traditional medical approach.
