Mental Disorder Test: It Will Put Psychiatry On Par With Other Medical Specialties” He Said

Now this would create financial incentives for providers to get involved in resilience and prevention for their patient population. Niculescu, who is also working on identifying biomarkers for diagnosing anxiety and stress as well as hallucinations in schizophrenia, said the bipolar findings will be the dawning of a brand new age in psychiatry. It should put psychiatry on par with other medical specialties, he said. Art Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania and a msnbc, genetic testing for disease similar to police officer or to enroll in the military. As a result, the tests are particularly concerning if they will be used to screen for mental illness in the workplace or for college admittance, Caplan said.

These same genes could ultimately be turned into a test to make an initial diagnosis, he said, the goal of the new study was to identify genes or biomarkers that going to be used to track the severity of the symptoms of mania or depression in people already diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

Now researchers have shown that 10 genes that can be detected in the blood could provide a better way to assess a patient.

Currently, bipolar disorder and similar conditions like depression are diagnosed on the basis of the patient’s description of their symptoms and the physician’s judgment, sometimes making it difficult to get an accurate diagnosis or determine the severity of a patient’s condition. Fact, lab tests that can accurately detect mental illnesses have been considered the Holy Grail of psychiatry. Researchers looked for differences in gene activity between the high and low mood groups. Besides, the comparison enabled them to identify 10 genes for predicting mood state. They so incorporated the results with genetic data from animal models and gene activity from samples taken from the brains of deceased bipolar or depressed patients. By calculating a score on the basis of whether every gene is active in a blood sample, the researchers could predict high mood if the score was high and low mood if the score was low.

Did you know that the calculated scores were 85 percent accurate in predicting high mood and 77 percent accurate in predicting low mood, when these genes were examined in the initial group of patients. Steve Mitchell is a science and medicine writer in Washington, His articles have appeared in various newspapers, magazines and Web sites, including UPI, Reuters Health, The Scientist and WebMD. One challenge of the test could have been a disconnect between the results and how a patient says they feel, said Dr. Will say they don’t feel better, rabins noted that in cases of severe depression, a patient sometimes will look better to their friends and doctors after starting treatment. Of course, peter Rabins, a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University’s Berman Bioethics Institute in Baltimore. They should be misdiagnosed with depression and prescribed antidepressants, that can trigger a dangerous manic state.