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. 2015 May 20:4:235.
doi: 10.1186/s40064-015-1002-y. eCollection 2015.

Beneficial effect of phosphatidylcholine supplementation in alleviation of hypomania and insomnia in a Chinese bipolar hypomanic boy and a possible explanation to the effect at the genetic level

Shitao Rao  1 , Marco H B Lam  2 , Yun Kwok Wing  2 , Larina C L Yim  2 , Winnie C W Chu  3 , Venus S Y Yeung  1 , Mary M Y Waye  1
Affiliations

Beneficial effect of phosphatidylcholine supplementation in alleviation of hypomania and insomnia in a Chinese bipolar hypomanic boy and a possible explanation to the effect at the genetic level

Shitao Rao et al. Springerplus. .

Abstract

Introduction: Recent studies indicated that supplementation of phosphatidylcholine has been found to be beneficial for psychiatric diseases and Diacylglycerol Kinase, Eta (DGKH) protein was involved in regulating the metabolism of phosphatidic acid and diacylglycerol. This study reported a case of a 16-year-old Chinese boy with bipolar hypomania symptoms receiving supplementation of phosphatidylcholine, and a genetic study of a risk variant of DGKH gene was performed in an attempt to provide an explanation for the potential beneficial effect of phosphatidylcholine supplementation.

Case description: We described a case of a 16-year-old boy with bipolar disorder, who suffered from monthly episodes of insomnia accompanied by hypomania for 5 months despite adherence to medication. After supplementation of phosphatidylcholine, he returned to a normal sleeping pattern and recovered from hypomania symptoms for approximately 14 months. Furthermore, genotyping results showed that this boy carries the risk genotype (G/C) in DGKH variant rs77072822 (adjusted p-value = 0.025 after 2000 permutation tests).

Discussion and evaluation: The 16-year-old boy appears to have benefited from the supplementation with phosphatidylcholine and recovered from hypomania symptoms. He carries a risk genotype in rs77072822 which lies in the first intron of DGKH gene that was mostly reported to be associated with bipolar disorder. Thus, this finding is consistent with the hypothesis that alleviating the phosphatidylcholine deficiencies might accompany with the risk variants of DGKH gene, which might improve the efficacies of such supplementation and design new treatment strategies for bipolar disorder.

Conclusions: This study illustrated that a 16-year-old boy with hypomania symptoms responded well to supplementation of phosphatidylcholine and the boy carries a risk genotype in DGKH gene for bipolar disorder, which provides a possible explanation for the boy's beneficial effect at the genetic level.

Keywords: Bipolar hypomania; Diacylglycerol kinase eta (DGKH); Metabolism of diacylglycerol; Phosphatidylcholine supplementation; Susceptibility polymorphism.

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Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
LD Block 2 of the DGKH gene. The graph was generated by Haploview program based on the population of Han Chinese genotype data downloaded from the HapMap project (Data Phase III/Rel#2, Feb09). The figure located in the lower left corner is the LD Block across the whole DGKH gene. The SNPs in the red boxes had been identified to be associated with bipolar disorder in Baum’s study (single marker analyses) or Zeng’s study (haplotype analyses, i.e. rs9315885-rs9532988-rs1012053)
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Episodes of hypomania as a function of time plotted by time toaster (a freely available web tool). The time of a full moon is represented by a filled spot while an episode of hypomania is represented with an unfilled spot, with various sizes scaled to the duration of the episodes. Supplementation of phosphatidylcholine was initiated on May 28, 2012, and no hypomania episode was observed after that date for five months (from mid-May to mid-Oct, 2012) and following nine months (data not shown)
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
DNA sequence analyses of rs77072822 polymorphism in the 16-year-old boy with bipolar hypomania (a) and his 19-year-old healthy sister (b)
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