Aswad
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Joined: 4/4/2007
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Duskypearls
Fascinating, thank you. Have you any clue where one might look for this information?
I looked up the Maori bit, at least, which I wasn't remembering accurately, or perhaps I picked it up from poor sources.
Long story short, the Maori are a red herring used to feed the media to get publicity for a study.
On to what was intended to be brief when I started...
In Caucasian Americans, about two in three carry a high activity gene variant that reduces the risk of aggressive, antisocial and violent behavior in males that have been subjected to abuse and neglect during childhood. This gene variant has no effect in African Americans. The gene, in all its variants, codes for subtype A of the enzyme Monoamine Oxidase, which is responsible for breaking down neurotransmitters. Specifically, that subtype preferentially breaks down serotonin, melatonin and norepinephrine. A different gene codes for subtype B of the same enzyme. That subtype preferentially breaks down dopamine and phenetylamine, but also breaks down norepinephrine. Both types play a small part in breaking down histamine, and a significant role in breaking down tyramine and other exogenous amines.
Monoamine oxidase inhibitors, which reduce the activity of either or both subtypes of that enzyme, are the most potent class of antidepressants that are legal for general use. Due to several pages worth of interactions and significant dietary restrictions, they are usually reserved for inpatients and those outpatients that have failed to respond to anything else. In this otherwise 'hopeless' population, about four out of five will achieve lasting remission on the first inhibitor tried, and significant improvement is generally seen in a matter of days. However, they cost more, and if you ignore the interactions and restrictions, you face a distinct possibility of myocardial infarction, cerebral hemorrhage, extreme fever, convulsions and death. In our litigatious era, you can see where this caveat might pose a problem for widespread use. Treated with respect, though, these drugs are remarkably safe, most having a proven track record of decades, and some of the new ones carry few to no dietary restrictions. There are several on the market, which vary in their secondary effects, accounting for the difference in response (tranylcypromine is more energizing, phenelzine is more sedating, isocarbaxozid is fairly neutral, selegiline is mild).
In summary, we have a pretty good idea that brain minus monoamine oxidase equals brain minus depression, most of the time.
Unfortunately, depression has some functions. One of those functions is to make sure that people that are abused and/or neglected over an extended period of time, such as throughout childhood, do not take it upon themselves to decide to lash out. Learning that the supposedly best people in the world- your caregivers- will make you suffer intolerably without rhyme or reason tends to cause you to assume the rest of the world either don't give a shit or are just as bad. This almost invariably leads to social dysfunctions of one sort or the other. When depression isn't an option, that dysfunction tends to be of a sort that is detrimental to society at large, and bolstered by a metric fuckton of anger, bitterness and so forth.
This adaptation, we call being antisocial, and we have selected against it for a long time, unfortunately not by sterilizing parents that abuse or neglect their kids. Caucasians have apparently been selecting harder against it, indicating either a greater prevalence of parental abuse and neglect, or less opportunity for antisocial people to live without coming into conflict with society, or lower tolerance for such conflicts. Since the Maōri people have a greater prevalence of parental abuse and neglect, it stands to reason that can't be the sole factor in selection in Caucasians if the small sample tested are genetically representative of the rest of the population.
Studies are unclear on the causal relationships involved as regards depression, but that is to be expected in the absence of a large study that corrects for environment factors, seperates by gender, and confines itself to Caucasians, where we know the gene has a direct influence. The presence of a genetic resillience factor in a portion of the population does not seem unlikely, nor that it might account for both positive and negative deviation from the norm. The data is simply inadequate for a firm conclusion.
Women respond differently to abuse and neglect, but most of the studies I saw when skimming were specifically studies of men, which fits the prevalent pattern of assuming men are a priori more relevant with regards to violence (which, admittedly, we are if you exclude violence directed at children; the shifting gender roles are changing this, however, most notably in domestic violence and violence under the influence of drugs).
Thus I cannot say anything conclusive about the effect on women, but what LaT and LH said earlier about not having the luxury of breaking down does seem to indicate a variation from the norm that is reasonably consistent with what I posited as the mechanism involved with this gene. Their shared sense of contempt for normative individuals' response to stress and trauma is arguably a mild antisocial trait, which is somewhat interesting. Given what is known about differences in impulse control, social sensitivity and risk management in the genders, it is not unlikely that a woman would express things differently than a man when equipped with the same genes and background, which makes me curious about the possibility of a tie-in with sadism.
I should at this point say something to LaT and LH: I adore you both, just as you are. Don't bite my head(s) off. 
When I found myself reorganizing things under subheadings during the edit, I pared things down to a bare minimum (cough) and will round off here with a note that Google and Wikipedia will undoubtedly furnish you with a near endless amount of information related to the subject(s). If you're fine with reading technical articles, PubMed, PLoS, Cochrane, etc. are probably going to provide a number of scholarly papers that will be a far better and more accurate source of information than my grab bag of trivia and ruminations about same.
In any case, I hope this has provided a starting point and some keywords to help with searching.
I wish you well,
— Aswad.
_____________________________
"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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