ArticleNPJ schizophrenia2018
Genetic vulnerability to DUSP22 promoter hypermethylation is involved in the relation between in utero famine exposure and schizophrenia.
Article in NPJ schizophrenia, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers, 4 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed, 4 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 48 citations in OpenAlex.
- The association between prenatal famine, DNA methylation and mental disorders: a systematic review and meta-analysis.Clinical epigenetics · 2023Pooled it
- Disease classification for whole-blood DNA methylation: Meta-analysis, missing values imputation, and XAI.GigaScience · 2022Pooled it
- Meta-analysis of epigenome-wide associations between DNA methylation at birth and childhood cognitive skills.Molecular psychiatry · 2022Pooled it
- Epigenetic mechanisms in schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders: a systematic review of empirical human findings.Molecular psychiatry · 2020Pooled it
- Folic acid intervention during pregnancy alters DNA methylation, affecting neural target genes through two distinct mechanisms.Clinical epigenetics · 2022Trial
- Epigenetic legacy of early-life undernutrition: methodological lessons from Dutch and Chinese famine studies.Frontiers in genetics · 2026Review
- Read mismapping from segmental duplications drives spuriousbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Mouse metastable epialleles are extremely rare.Nucleic acids research · 2025Article
- Newborn mitochondrial DNA copy number is associated with changes to DNA methylation that persist into childhood and are associated with cognitive development.Clinical epigenetics · 2025Article
- Non-coding 886 (Epigenetics · 2024Review
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- CRISPR/Cas-Based Approaches to Study Schizophrenia and Other Neurodevelopmental Disorders.International journal of molecular sciences · 2022Review
- Epigenome-wide association studies of occupational exposure to benzene and formaldehyde.Epigenetics · 2022Article
- Schizophrenia-associated differential DNA methylation in brain is distributed across the genome and annotated to MAD1L1, a locus at which DNA methylation and transcription phenotypes share genetic variation with schizophrenia risk.Translational psychiatry · 2022Article
- The shared mother-child epigenetic signature of neglect is related to maternal adverse events.Frontiers in physiology · 2022Article
- The proteomic architecture of schizophrenia iPSC-derived cerebral organoids reveals alterations in GWAS and neuronal development factors.Translational psychiatry · 2021Article
- JKAP relates to disease risk, severity, and Th1 and Th17 differentiation in Parkinson's disease.Annals of clinical and translational neurology · 2021Article
- Prenatal famine exposure and adult health outcomes: an epigenetic link.Environmental epigenetics · 2021Review
- Schizophrenia and Epigenetic Aging Biomarkers: Increased Mortality, Reduced Cancer Risk, and Unique Clozapine Effects.Biological psychiatry · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
26 authors at 6 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Epigenetic changes may account for the doubled risk to develop schizophrenia in individuals exposed to famine in utero. We therefore investigated DNA methylation in a unique sample of patients and healthy individuals conceived during the great famine in China. Subsequently, we examined two case-control samples without famine exposure in whole blood and brain tissue. To shed light on the causality of the relation between famine exposure and DNA methylation, we exposed human fibroblasts to nutritional deprivation. In the famine-exposed schizophrenia patients, we found significant hypermethylation of the dual specificity phosphatase 22 (DUSP22) gene promoter (Chr6:291687-293285) (N = 153, p = 0.01). In this sample, DUSP22 methylation was also significantly higher in patients independent of famine exposure (p = 0.025), suggesting that hypermethylation of DUSP22 is also more generally involved in schizophrenia risk. Similarly, DUSP22 methylation was also higher in two separate case-control samples not exposed to famine using DNA from whole blood (N = 64, p = 0.03) and postmortem brains (N = 214, p = 0.007). DUSP22 methylation showed strong genetic regulation across chromosomes by a region on chromosome 16 which was consistent with new 3D genome interaction data. The presence of a direct link between famine and DUSP22 transcription was supported by data from cultured human fibroblasts that showed increased methylation (p = 0.048) and expression (p = 0.019) in response to nutritional deprivation (N = 10). These results highlight an epigenetic locus that is genetically regulated across chromosomes and that is involved in the response to early-life exposure to famine and that is relevant for a major psychiatric disorder.
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Registered trials
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