The first laboratory test capable of diagnosing depression in adults through a blood test was recently developed by a group of scholars from the prestigious Northwestern University of Chicago.
It is a completely innovative discovery in the context of diagnosis of depressionup to now based exclusively on non -objective and consistent methods in the evaluation of non -specific symptoms (such as the lowering of mood, the feeling of tiredness or changes of appetite) which can also be found in a large number of other diseases, both mental and physical.
To increase the problem of poor objectivity in the diagnosis of depression other variables also affect, such as the patient’s ability to report their inner experiences (usually reduced to this pathology) and the greater or lesser ability of the doctor in understanding and interpreting them.
On the basis of these considerations, it can be understood how the efforts of the scholars have been directed, for many years now, in the development of more suitable and appropriate diagnostic systems, oriented to the identification in the blood of “Markers” of depressionwhose feedback can make this diagnosis more objective and specific.
There depressionin the “major” form called, it is a psychiatric disease that affects 6.7% of the adult population of the United States over the course of a year, with constantly increasing impact rates; Moreover, various studies agree that a delay in the formulation of the diagnosis that can go from 2 to 40 months, with the evident consequence of differing the beginning of the treatments, usually occurs.
The possibility therefore of having a “biological” diagnosis can clearly reduce these timing with positive repercussions on the effectiveness of the same therapies.
The team of Chicago scientists, led by David Mohr and Eva Redei, seems to have opened new perspectives in this sense, with the identification in the blood of nine types of RNA Messenger (that is, molecules that have the function of transporting the information taken into the genetic heritage to the cells), which, in patients suffering from depressionpresent significantly lower concentrations than healthy people.
In counterprova of this discovery, the authors of the work report an equally significant fact, consisting in the fact that the blood levels of these markers tend to return to normal again in those patients who have undergone a behavioral cognitive psychotherapeutic treatment for 18 weeks and from which an evident has derived improvement of depressionthus being able to establish a parallelism between “laboratory” data and clinical evaluation.
Another interesting positive impact deriving from the analysis of the data of this study is the possibility of using, for the first time, a blood test to determine which treatments will be more useful for individual patients, since a specific structure of these markers, detected before the start of the treatment, is able to predict whether the patient can benefit from the Cognitive behavioral psychotherapy.
Finally, it has been found that the concentration of the blood of three of these markers remains constantly lower, in patients with depression, even when these patients have reported good effectiveness from antidepressant treatments, as if this were indicative of the presence of a chronic alteration of these markers who could configure the biological test of a state of “Vulnerability” to depression.
This last figure opens up new perspectives in the monitoring of people who are, on the basis of these laboratory findings, more susceptible to the depressive repercussions and therefore candidates for a more prolonged pharmacological or psychotherapeutic treatment treatment.
The authors of the study underline, in conclusion, that these data, although susceptible to further insights, suggest the possibility that even the depressive pathology may one day be diagnosed in a precise and measurable way, as for a long time it has been possible to do with the devices that detect blood pressure or the level of cholesterol in the blood, returning the depressive disease to a less random and uncertain dimension in its classifies.
Translational psychiatry (2014) 4, E442; Published Online 16 September 2014
