Latest News

VA Connecticut Healthcare Center and Yale School of Medicine researchers have completed the first well-powered, genome-wide association study of epiretinal membrane, a common retinal disorder that often causes visual distortion or loss of visual acuity. The first author was Joel Gelernter, MD. Co-author was Daniel Levey, PhD.

Marco Galimberti, PhD, postdoctoral associate, and Joel Gelernter, MD, Foundations Fund Professor of Psychiatry and Professor of Genetics and of Neuroscience, are first and senior authors, respectively, of a paper on Molecular Psychiatry that investigates the genetic architecture and causal relationships between cannabis use disorder and lifetime cannabis use with risk for developing substance use disorders and substance use traits.

A study led by VA Connecticut Healthcare Center/Yale researchers reveals ancestries around the world possess a shared genetic architecture for problematic alcohol use – habitual heavy drinking, accompanied by harmful consequences. Hang Zhou, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry and of biomedical informatics & data science at Yale School of Medicine and VA Connecticut, and Joel Gelernter, MD, Foundations Fund Professor of Psychiatry, and professor of genetics and of neuroscience at Yale School of Medicine and VA Connecticut, were first and senior authors, respectively.

Peter Na, MD, MPH, assistant professor of psychiatry, and Robert Pietrzak, PhD, MPH, professor of psychiatry and of public health, led a research team that examined the psychosocial moderators of high alcohol consumption determined by polygenic risk in military veterans.

A new study led by Yale scientists has identified genetic risk factors associated with habitual heavy drinking.

Several Yale researchers, including first author Janitza Montalvo-Ortiz, PhD, and senior author Robert Pietrzak, PhD, MPH, conducted the largest epi-genomewide association study of post-traumatic stress disorder in veterans. Their findings were published in Translational Psychiatry.

Joel Gelernter, MD, Foundations Fund Professor of Psychiatry and Professor of Genetics and of Neuroscience; and Renato Polimanti, PhD, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, will co-lead the journal Complex Psychiatry, which recently changed its name from Molecular Neuropsychiatry.

Heavy drinkers and alcoholics share genetic similarities but also exhibit key differences, a massive new genome-wide analysis published April 2 in the journal Nature Communications found.