Your mama or your MAOA? Monoamine oxidase-A, co-implicated in mood and behavior disorders.

It is generally accepted that bad parenting leads to psychopathology -- unless the child is "resilient." But which kids are resilient? Those who overcome bad environments.

Is this a circular argument or nonsense? Some remarkable findings concerning this question have risen from an emerging interdisciplinary approach known as psychiatric epidemiology. Psychiatric epidemiology combines genetics, epidemiology and neuroscience to investigate how genes and environment affect vulnerability to psychiatric and mood disorders. Last year two of this discipline's leaders, Avshalom Caspi and Terrie Moffitt, reviewed its main findings in Nature Reviews Neuroscience. Their paper, "Gene-Environment Interactions in Psychiatry: Joining Forces with Neuroscience" [see abstract or pdf download of the paper] suggests that the gene may have less of a stranglehold on one's destiny than is often assumed. The paper also raises questions about why so-called maladaptive responses to environment, such as depression or passivity, have survived millennia of selective pressure.

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