L. Erlenmeyer-Kimling, Ph.D.

Psychiatric genetics is a comparatively old field that has recently shown a great deal of new activity and growth. Traditionally, the goals of psychiatric genetics have been to understand, through statistical associations, whether and how genetic factors contribute to the liability to develop a given psychiatric disorder. In the past two decades, however, the objectives of the field have expanded substantially to include: (1) attempts to identify and characterize the actual genes that are implicated in the liability to a particular disorder; (2) a search for biobehavioral traits that may be associated with this liability to and the investigation of the genetic bases of these traits; (3) a more precise specification of environmental stressors that may interact with genetic susceptibilities, thereby causing a malfunctioning in certain regions of the brain that can lead to a psychiatric condition such as schizophrenia.

Our group's focus is chiefly on schizophrenia. We also study the range of less severe disorders called the schizophrenic spectrum as well as major affective disorders and their differences relative to schizophrenia. Our main research program is a multi-disciplinary longitudinal study following, from childhood through mid-adulthood, individuals who are offspring of schizophrenic or affectively ill parents and who are thus at high statistical risk for developing these disorders, in addition to low-risk offspring of psychiatrically normal parents. Primary aims of this study have been concerned with (1) identifying deviant patterns of neurobehavioral traits (e.g., attention, cognitive, neuromotor and psychophysiological functioning) in the high-risk children and (2) determining the predictive relationship between childhood deviance in these behaviors and later development of schizophrenia-related disorders. Further research concentrates on the study of genetic aspects of sensory and cognitive inhibition deficits in schizophrenic patients and their adult nonpsychotic relatives, in addition to low-risk offspring of psychiatrically normal parents.

1. Penney TB, Meck WH, Roberts SA, Gibbon J, Erklenmeyer-Kimling L (2005). Interval-timing deficits in individuals at high risk for schizophrenia. Brain Cogn., 58: 109-118.

2. Erlenmeyer-Kimling L, Hans S, Ingraham L, Marcus J, Wynne L, Rehman A, Roberts SA, Auerbach J (2005). Handedness in children of schizophrenic parents: data from three high-risk studies. Behav Genet, 35(3): 351-358. Review.

3. Erlenmeyer-Kimling L., Roberts S.A., Rock D. (Publication date: February 2004): Longitudinal prediction of schizophrenia in a prospective high-risk study. In: Behavior Genetic Principles - Development, Personality, and Psychopathology: Essays in Honor of Irving I. Gottesman (L. DiLalla, ed.). Washington, D.C.: APA.

4. Gottesman I.I., Erlenmeyer-Kimling L. (2001): Family and twin strategies as a head start in defining prodromes and endophenotypes for hypothetical early-interventions in schizophrenia. Schizophrenia Research, 51:93-102 (full text).

5. Erlenmeyer-Kimling L (2001). Early neurobehavioral deficits as phenotypic indicators of the schizophrenia genotype and predictors of later psychosis. American Journal of Medical Genetics (Neuropsychiatric Genetics), 105:23-24 (full text).

6. Erlenmeyer-Kimling L., Rock D., Roberts S.A., Janal M., Kestenbaum C., Cornblatt B., Hilldoff-Adamo U., and Gottesman I.I. (2000). Attention, Memory, and Motor Skills as Childhood Predictors of Schizophrenia-Related
Pyschoses: The New York High-Risk Project. American Journal of Psychiatry, 157(9): 1416-1422 (full text).

7. Erlenmeyer-Kimling L., Hilldoff-Adamo U., Rock D., Roberts S.A., Bassett A.S., Squires-Wheeler E., Cornblatt B.A., Endicott J., Pape S. and Gottesman I.I. (1997). The New York High-Risk Project. Prevalence and comorbidity of Axis I disorders in offspring of schizophrenic parents at 25-year follow-up. Arch. Gen. Psychiatry, 54 (12):1096-1102 (abstract).

8. Erlenmeyer-Kimling L. (1995). A look at the evolution of developmental models of schizophrenia. In: Psychopathology: the evolving science of mental disorder. (S. Matthysse, D. Levy, J. Kagan, O. and F.M. Benes, eds.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, pp. 229-252.