GSK-3β polymorphism discriminates bipolar disorder and schizophrenia: a systematic meta-analysis.

Glycogen synthase kinase 3 (GSK-3) is a well-known conserved and ubiquitous protein kinase and playing a pivotal role in neurodevelopment, neurogenesis, learning/memory, and neuronal cell death. Dysfunction of GSK-3 had been seen in multiple neurodegenerative and psychiatric diseases. Bipolar disorder and schizophrenia are two common psychiatric diseases first occur in adolescence or young adulthood. They share similar risk genes as well as clinical symptoms, which make it is difficult to be discriminated from each other. Here, by using meta-analysis we reported that glycogen synthase kinase 3β promoter inactive mutant rs334558 may contribute to the development of schizophrenia not bipolar disorder. This might be used to distinguish these two diseases.