Are you depressed? Take the DNA depression test… coming soon at GenePlaza

More than 300 million people of all ages suffer from depression in the world, so about 4pc of the world population. Yes we are human… In a few weeks, GenePlaza will launch its new app to have a genetic test to measure your predisposition regarding depression.

Depression Key facts from the World Health Organization

  • a common mental disorder.
  • a leading cause of disability worldwide.
  • More women are affected than men.
  • At its worst, depression can lead to suicide.
  • There are effective psychological and pharmacological treatments.

More from the World Health Organization

 

What is Depression?

Depression (major depressive disorder) is a common and serious medical illness that negatively affects how you feel, the way you think and how you act. Fortunately, it is also treatable. Depression causes feelings of sadness and/or a loss of interest in activities once enjoyed. It can lead to a variety of emotional and physical problems and can decrease a person’s ability to function at work and at home. More on Psychiatry.org

Major symptoms

  • Feelings of guilt, worthlessness, or helplessness
  • Decreased energy or fatigue
  • Moving or talking more slowly
  • Feeling sad or having a depressed mood
  • Loss of interest or pleasure in activities once enjoyed
  • Changes in appetite — weight loss or gain unrelated to dieting
  • Trouble sleeping or sleeping too much
  • Feeling restless or having trouble sitting still
  • Difficulty concentrating, remembering, thinking or making decisions
  • Early-morning awakening, or oversleeping
  • Loss of energy or increased fatigue
  • Increase in purposeless physical activity (e.g., hand-wringing or pacing) or slowed movements and speech (actions observable by others)
  • Thoughts of death or suicide, or suicide attempts
  • Persistent sad, anxious, or “empty” mood
  • Feelings of hopelessness, or pessimism
  • IrritabilityFeeling restless or having trouble sitting stillAppetite and/or weight changes
  • Aches or pains, headaches, cramps, or digestive problems without a clear physical cause and/or that do not ease even with treatment

Risk factors

It is one of the most common mental disorders in the world. Current research suggests that depression is caused by a combination of genetic, biological, environmental, and psychological factors.

  • Personal or family history
  • Major life changes, trauma, or stress
  • Certain physical illnesses and medications
  • Biochemistry: Differences in certain chemicals in the brain may contribute to symptoms of depression.
  • Genetics: Depression can run in families. For example, if one identical twin has depression, the other has a 70 percent chance of having the illness sometime in life.
  • Personality: People with low self-esteem, who are easily overwhelmed by stress, or who are generally pessimistic appear to be more likely to experience depression.
  • Environmental factors: Continuous exposure to violence, neglect, abuse or poverty may make some people more vulnerable to depression.

 

More on Psychiatry.org

Insights from the world health organisation

Depression is different from usual mood fluctuations and short-lived emotional responses to challenges in everyday life. Especially when long-lasting and with moderate or severe intensity, depression may become a serious health condition. It can cause the affected person to suffer greatly and function poorly at work, at school and in the family. At its worst, depression can lead to suicide. Close to 800 000 people die due to suicide every year. Suicide is the second leading cause of death in 15-29-year-olds.

Although there are known, effective treatments for depression, fewer than half of those affected in the world (in many countries, fewer than 10%) receive such treatments. Barriers to effective care include a lack of resources, lack of trained health-care providers, and social stigma associated with mental disorders. Another barrier to effective care is inaccurate assessment.

 

Depression statistics for some countries in the world (alphabetical ranking)

  • Belgium: 14%
  • France: 21%
  • Germany: 10%
  • Israel: 10%
  • Italy: 10%
  • Japan: 6%
  • New Zealand: 18%
  • Spain: 11%
  • United States: 19%

Here is the full study coming from BMC Medecine.

Treatment and Therapies

Mainly medications and psychotherapies, check the site of the National Institute of Mental Health.

Are you depressed?

Let’s have a look at a few tests:

Coming soon… GenePlaza will implement the genetic based research to help you to understand your genetic predisposition to depression. 

It will tell you if you have a higher risk or lower risk to be depressed according to your genes. We all know that we have health predispositions due to our ancestors as written above:

Genetics are one of the main risk factors for depression: Depression can run in families. For example, if one identical twin has depression, the other has a 70 percent chance of having the illness sometime in life.

 

Do you want to take this test?

At GenePlaza, we help people to get to know themselves better thanks to our App Store.

 

Where did your Ancestors live 8.000 years ago? – World premiere

GenePlaza 30 APR, 2018

WORLD PREMIERE AT GENEPLAZA

Where did your Ancestors live 8.000 years ago?

The K14 Ancient Cultures Admixture Calculator will give you the answer!

We are very proud at GenePlaza to have the world’s first DNA based application to include the last genomes of neolithic ancestral lately discovered!

Those are groundbreaking discoveries allowing the developer of this application, Mr Khan, to have a better understanding of our ancestry back to 8.000 years ago.

The ADMIXTURE based calculator parses your genome and compares it to very recently sequenced ancient cultures from Europe, Africa, Central and South Asia.

Mr Khan said about his last K14 application:

“These new higher quality genomes greatly added to our understanding of the population demography of Europe, Western, Central, and South Asia.
Thus we believe that 
this is the most accurate Ancestry based calculator to date which is based on ancient populations.”

The main difference with the creator’s Ancient ADMIXTURE calculator is that the latter breaks down ethnogenesis in deeper neolithic ancestral terms than this calculator


How to get this study with your own data?

  • You don’t have your DNA

=> Buy your test kit (no US sales as of now) on GenePlaza and buy the application of Mr Khan for 5€ once you get your results

  • You have your DNA

=> Register for free on GenePlaza, Upload your results and buy Mr Khan application for 5€, know your result directly


A quick overview of the K14 Ancient Cultures Admixture Calculator

 

THE K14 ANCIENT CULTURES CALCULATOR

The motivation behind this calculator was the recent publication of dozens of higher quality ancient genomes in Mathieson et al., 2018; The Genomic History Of Southeastern Europe and in Olalde et al., 2017 The Beaker Phenomenon And The Genomic Transformation Of Northwest Europe, and in Narasimhan et al., 2018,The Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia.

These genomes greatly added to our understanding of the population demography of Europe, Western, Central, and South Asia, and this calculator is the 1st public ADMIXTURE based calculator to parse your genome and compare it to very recently sequenced ancient cultures from Central and South Asia.

To increase the accuracy of the results, and SNP overlaps between the customer and the calculator population references, only genomes with the highest average read depth coverage were carefully chosen to source the component allele frequencies.

The calculator algorithm used is detailed at the calculator creator’s website; Eurasian DNA.

This calculator uses higher coverage ancient genomes from the aforementioned as well as previous studies to represent the various Neolithic, Chalcolithic, and Bronze Age cultures, stretching from western Europe all the way to central Asia and Siberia, and which contributed to the genetic makeup of the various modern populations currently residing across Eurasia.

A map of the various ancient cultures existing up to 8000 years ago 

 

Beaker people are known for their distinctive bell beaker style pottery. The culture spread across Europe likely from the Iberian peninsula all the way to Poland around 4700 years ago and lasted till around 3800 years ago. They appear to have displaced the Corded Ware culture which had thrived earlier in eastern Europe.

Prior to the spread of the Beaker culture, Britain was occupied by British Neolithic farmers who were genetically very similar to Iberian Neolithic farmers, suggesting a movement to Britain from Western Europe rather from Germany. The German and SE European Neolithic farmers are likely ancestral to the Iberian and British Neolithic farmers, the latter being distinguished by an additional layer of Western-European Hunter-Gatherers (WHG) admixture. WHG were the long-time occupants of Europe prior to the arrival of the Neolithic farmers from the Near-East around 8000 years ago.

WHG who had occupied Europe for many millennia since the Upper Paleolithic appear to have survived in almost un-admixed form until as recently as 7800 years ago in Serbia and Romania (Iron Gates HG). They were subsequently absorbed into the Neolithic farmer societies which had spread from Anatolia into Europe around 8000 years ago.

The 2nd major population movement into Europe came from the Eurasian steppes (Russia) to the east around the Bronze age. These Eurasian steppe folks were derived from cultures such as the Yamna, Srubna, and Andronovo and it is very likely that is how Indo-European languages were introduced into Europe. Todays Europeans are substantially a tri-fold mixture of WHG, Neolithic farmers originating from the Near-East, and Eurasian steppe pastoralists, in varying proportions. Eurasian steppe pastoralists genetic sub-structure includes Eastern European Hunter-Gatherers (EHG) ancestry as well as Caucasus Hunter-Gatherers (CHG) and Iranian Neolithic farmer ancestry.

There are also additional other minor contributions to Europe’s genetic landscape, including minor African/SW Asian admixture especially in southern Europe, and E Asian / Siberian admixture, which was likely contributed by populations related to the Bronze age Karasuk culture via Uralic proxies, Scythians, and various Turkic groups.

List of the ancient cultures referred to in this app

Here we also utilize for the first time ancient genomes from Turan (present-day Iran, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan), the Indus Valley ( present-day Pakistan), and from various cultures in Kazakhstan and surrounds, which are believed to have introduced Indo-European languages into the region. Ancestry from the Eurasian Steppe genetically linked Europe and South Asia in the Bronze Age. Present day South and West Asians owe their existence to these ancient populations.

 

From the Narasimhan et al. 2018 pre-print

Our data reveal a complex set of genetic sources that ultimately combined to form the ancestry of South Asians today. We document a southward spread of genetic ancestry from the Eurasian Steppe, correlating with the archaeologically known expansion of pastoralist sites from the Steppe to Turan in the Middle Bronze Age (2300-1500 BCE). These Steppe communities mixed genetically with peoples of the Bactria Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC) whom they encountered in Turan (primarily descendants of earlier agriculturalists of Iran).

Steppe communities integrated farther south throughout the 2nd millennium BCE, and we show that they mixed with a more southern population that we document at multiple sites as outlier individuals exhibiting a distinctive mixture of ancestry related to Iranian agriculturalists and South Asian hunter-gathers. We call this group Indus Periphery because they were found at sites in cultural contact with the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) and along its northern fringe, and also because they were genetically similar to post-IVC groups in the Swat Valley of Pakistan.

By co-analyzing ancient DNA and genomic data from diverse present-day South Asians, we show that Indus Periphery-related people are the single most important source of ancestry in South Asia—consistent with the idea that the Indus Periphery individuals are providing us with the first direct look at the ancestry of peoples of the IVC—and we develop a model for the formation of present-day South Asians in terms of the temporally and geographically proximate sources of Indus Periphery-Our results show how ancestry from the Steppe genetically linked Europe and South Asia in the Bronze Age, and identifies the populations that almost certainly were responsible for spreading Indo-European languages across much of Eurasia.

Have a look at the preview of the K14 results on GenePlaza and Buy it after creating your account if you have your DNA or buy your DNA kit if you don’t have it yet.

 

The researcher who developed this K14 Cultures Admixture Calculator is Mr Khan. Visit the website of the author: EurasianDNA.com

How does it work?

This app is dedicated to furthering the understanding of population histories. To facilitate this, the author, Mr Khan, employs an arsenal of tools, including programs such as:
1- ADMIXTOOLS by Reich Lab from David Reich: To formally analyze genomes for shared genetic drift, and for modelling samples based on ancestral components, (qpDstat, qpAdm, f3, etc);
2- PLINK: To prepare and process DNA data sets;
3- BEAGLE: For phasing, imputation and IBD analysis;
4- ADMIXTURE: For grouping individuals into clusters based on shared allele frequencies for some derived alleles.

Do you want to read more? 

Have a look at this Guardian article:  Arrival of Beaker folk changed Britain forever, ancient DNA study shows

 

Talking about us:

Two websites for sharing and comparing your results:

– Anthrogenica

– Theapricity

References:
1. The Genomic History of South-eastern Europe, Iain Mathieson et al., 2018.
2. The Beaker Phenomenon and the Genomic Transformation of Northwest Europe, Iñigo Olalde et al., 2017.
3. The Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia, Narasimhan et al., 2018.