Objective: To report a case of a child with bipolar disorder found to have an unbalanced translocation involving the long arm of chromosome 8, a region that has been previously implicated in genome-wide linkage scans.
Case report: A 7-year-old boy with a complex psychiatric symptom presentation including attention deficits, distractibility, impulsivity, pressured speech, sleep disturbance, aggressive behavior, and hypersexuality diagnosed with bipolar disorder. He also showed evidence of borderline intellectual and adaptive functioning and had mild dysmorphic features with a duplication of distal 8q that arose as an unbalanced chromosomal translocation due to a maternal 15p;8q insertion.
Conclusion: This finding of an unbalanced translocation provides further evidence to support previous linkage studies of a potential causative gene on 8q for bipolar disorder.