Not too long ago, scientists discovered two genes that play a major function in bipolar disorder. Hopefully, this discovery can lead to explanations of the  triggers that cause bipolar disorder as well as lead to more effective methods of treating the disease.

Bipolar disorder, also known as manic depression, has been recognized as an illness for decades. At one time many people believed that the cause of th illness was primarily due to bad parenting. Since the advent of the Human Genome Project, however, many amazing discoveries and insights have come to light. Foremost among these insights is that our genes play a much bigger role in many of our diseases than previously thought. The unavoidable conclusion is that heredity, while always considered a factor in diseases, seems to be much more of a factor than we realize.

The hope now is that researchers can use the recently identified bipolar genes to help to decipher exactly how these genes affects who gets the disease and who doesn't.

The head researcher of the study was Nick Craddock and took place at  Cardiff University in England. It consisted of studying the individual genomes of almost eleven thousand people of whom a bit less than half had been diagnosed with the bipolar disorder. The hope was that by comparing the genomes of those without the disorder to those with the disorder, the specific genomes for the disease could be isolated and studied.

Fortunately, the study ended up producing far more information than they had originally hoped for. The study identified two genes in the brain that held the key to the disease - the ANK3 gene and the CACNA1C gene.

There is a ton of anecdotal evidence linking depression from one generation of sufferers to the next. Past studies linking heredity to the disease have noted that if a child has one or more parent with bipolar disorder, she is significantly more likely to have the disease than is the child of someone whose parents do not have manic depression.

Precisely due to the apparently strong and obvious genetic factor, for a long time, researchers have been looking for the exact gene combinations that trigger the disease. Until the Human Genome Project came along, the primary method that researchers used to research the biological importance was to look at identical twins and adopted children. Studies of identical twins have consistently shown that if one twin has bipolar disorder, there is a much greater than 50% chance that the other has it as well.

Environment, on the other hand, seems to play no role. For example, studies have shown that in the instances where bipolar parents have adopted a child, that child does not show any increased probability of having the disease than does the general population. So, scientist have long suspected the role of genetics in the development of bipolar disease. But, the recent study at Cardiff University strongly confirms the theory.