About 150 years have passed since genetics introduced into the psychiatric fields. Nowadays, due to the development of biological psychiatry, psychiatric genetics become a very important section of the psychiatry, contributing to thE; research for genetic components of psychiatric disorders.
But genetic studies of psychiatric disorders have many problems. One reason of the difficulty is that psychiatric disorders do not follow Mendelian inheritance. Instead, psychiatric disorders seems that they have polygenic and multifactorial inheritance characteristics.
The authors reviewed the research methods of psychiatric genetics such as family study, twin and adoption study, segrE;gation analysis, linkage and association studies. Also the problems and issues of the research methods were discussed.
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