Role of elastin polymorphisms in panic disorder.

Panic disorder (PD) is a complex neuropsychiatric disorder that has been associated with an increased frequency of mitral valve prolapse. Elastin is a prominent component of mitral valves and, in a genome screen of 23 pedigrees with PD, we found evidence of linkage to the region of chromosome 7 that contains the elastin gene (ELN). Therefore, we examined the minimal essential promoter and coding regions of ELN in 23 independent probands from the families in our linkage studies using single strand conformational polymorphism analysis. We found three polymorphisms including one that coded for a non-conservative amino acid change. However, none of these polymorphisms were associated with panic disorder in a case-control analysis or linked to it in multiplex pedigrees. In our pedigrees, exonic polymorphisms in ELN do not play a major role in the genetic vulnerability to PD.