I'm always curious about what the
New York Times considers news. Today it features a
debunking report based on a
JAMA overview piece that undercuts a famous
study, by Avshalom Caspi, of what the press dubbed the "depression
gene." That research had found that different variants of the (to use its prior sobriquet) "Woody Allen gene" made people more or less liable to the effects of
stress, and thus more or less vulnerable to depression and
suicide.
Time magazine has comparable coverage as does the
Wall Street Journal.
Seeing the news stories, I went back and looked at how I had assessed information about the gene in Against Depression, in 2005. In part, I wrote: "If the same gene plays a more direct role in the shaping of personality — if it leads to neuroticism — then people with the short version of the gene will have a slightly greater liability to moodiness, from early in life, as well as a greater tendency to contract depression in the face of stress.It is almost the rule in behavioral genetics for later studies to weaken or complicate early findings. The New Zealand study has raised eyebrows on a number of grounds. Competing studies had found a less dramatic level of stress immunity in people with the protective variant of the gene. . . . . the heritable part of depression is almost certainly mediated by a variety of mechanisms shaped by a variety of genes — and most likely by different combinations of genes in different people. [Kenneth] Kendler’s statistical analysis indicates that there must be genes that influence depression and do not give rise to the neurotic personality style."
So,not perfect, but not a bad guess either, well in advance of the current meta-analysis . . . assuming that that study holds up.My own doubts and caveats were based on my conversations with Ken Kendler, as well as on earlier reports about the same alleles of the same gene that had found only very weak correlations with depression and stronger ones with anxiety and neuroticism.I don't imagine that I was the only commentator to use the initial Caspi study carefully. In effect, the current meta-analysis gives a formal shape to what the literature already suggested when the Caspi research appeared and so what any careful journalist could have reported all along.
Postscript: I should add (and the press reports should have made this point as well) that the new meta-analysis says nothing about the overall heritability of depression. Caspi and his colleagues may not have identified a gene that makes a major contribution to mood disorder, but depression is as "genetic" as it ever was — that is, at about the level of many other multi-system diseases. The major research on heritabiity comes from the very people the news reports quote, Ken Kendler and Kathleen Merikangas.
