IS LANGUAGE IMPAIRMENT IN SCHIZOPHRENIA RELATED TO LANGUAGE GENES?

Abstract

BackgroundSchizophrenia is considered a language related human specific disease. FOXP2 and CNTNAP2 are genes that have been related to language abnormalities; with FOXP2 additionally showing association with schizophrenia in a limited number of studies. In this study we investigated whether FOXP2 and CNTNAP2 are associated with a) severity of formal thought disorder (FTD) – a core language symptom present in schizophrenia, and b) animal fluency scores – a core language production deficit in schizophrenia; where patients have reduced performance.MethodsGenotyping for FOXP2 and CNTNAP2 was completed at rs17137124 and rs7794745. Comprehensive clinical interviews and fluency testing using the on..