There was no positive correlation between the 5-HTTLPR polymorphism and presence of mental symptoms in our sample, although the children were exposed to high levels of abuse, neglect, and urban violence.
We believe that this set of findings argues for principled reversal of directionality in associations at the 5-HTTLPR locus and raises the possibility that allelic variation may have very different consequences for personality traits or psychiatric symptoms depending on epistasis or epigenetic context.