Alex Jarram

Alex Jarram
Alex Jarram is a PhD student at University College London researching psychiatric genetics at the Molecular Psychiatry laboratory. Prior to studying for her PhD she spend two and half years running the DPIM (DNA Polymorphisms in Mental Illness) study under the watchful eye of Professor Hugh Gurling. The study aimed to get more individuals involved in genetics research, in particular bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and alcohol dependence. This was a natural progression from an Msc in Clinical Neuroscience at Kings and Bsc in Psychology and Neuroscience from Leicester. Her main interest is in marrying up the genetics research with clinical variables.

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Missing heritability: the final piece?

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Alex Jarram
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Uncovering the genetic component to common disease has been challenging. Whilst we now have more reliable heritability estimates (the proportion of susceptibility to disease which is accounted for by genetics), we are far from finding all genetic variants contributing to heritability. That is to say that if a disease is 80% heritable, we may have [read the full story…]

Estimating heritability in 5 psychiatric disorders: a 21st Century family study

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Alex Jarram
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It has long been established that psychiatric disorders have a genetic component. In the early days of genetic research, twin and family studies were used to estimate heritability (the proportion of variance explained by genetic factors). The Psychiatric Genetics Consortium has recently published a paper in Nature Genetics to assess the heritability and co-inheritability (relationship between [read the full story…]