The borderline personality disorder is a complex mental illness. The importance of this psychiatry disease has greatly increased in recent years. While diagnosis and treatment of borderline personality disorder has now been well established, the molecular events involved in pathogenesis of borderline disorders has not been clarified yet. Epigenetic changes play an important role in different malignancies including cancer and are also related to the pathogenesis of psychiatric diseases. A main feature of these epigenetic changes is the DNA hypermethylation of gene promoters that cause functional silencing of the according genes. For borderline personality disorder, studies that demonstrate the importance of gene promoter hypermethylation for the pathogenesis of this disease have not been conducted.

We aim to reveal epigenetic alterations in borderline personality disorder. By microarray-based promoter methylation assay we will identify genes that are hypermethylated in the borderline disorder. In parallel we will investigate epigenetic changes of candidate genes of which an aberrant function was related to borderline disorder.

Our study will clarify the pattern and frequency of DNA hypermethylation in borderline personality disorder. Therefore we expect novel findings on the pathoaetiology of this complex psychiatric disease.