NIMH Genetics Initiative millennium schizophrenia consortium : Linkage analysis of African-American pedigrees

The NIMH Genetics Initiative is a multi-sitecollaborative study designed to create a na-tional resource for genetic studies of com-plex neuropsychiatric disorders. Schizo-phrenia pedigrees have been collected atthree sites: Washington University, Colum-bia University, and Harvard University.This article—one in a series that describesthe results of a genome-wide scan with 459short-tandem repeat (STR) markers for sus-ceptibility loci in the NIMH Genetics Initia-tive schizophrenia sample—presents resultsfor African-American pedigrees. The Afri-can-American sample comprises 30 nuclearfamilies and 98 subjects. Seventy-nine of thefamily members were considered affectedby virtue of having received a DSMIII-R di-agnosis of schizophrenia (n = 71) or schizoaf-fective disorder, depressed (n = 8). The fami-lies contained a total of 42 independent sibpairs. While no region demonstrated evi-dence of significant linkage using the crite-ria suggested by Lander and Kruglyak, sev-eral regions, including chromosomes 6q16-6q24, 8pter-8q12, 9q32-9q34, and 15p13-15q12, showed evidence consistent withlinkage (