Researchers have developed a program that uses biological markers instead of symptoms for better classifying mental disorders – and soon help improve diagnosis and treatment of these conditions.
A team out of University of Georgia, writing in the American Journal of Psychiatry, identified biological markers for mental health conditions, for which no objective tests exist. Psychiatrists, for instance, cannot find proof of schizophrenia through blood samples and diagnose bipolar disorder via X-ray.
Study lead author and psychology professor Brett Clementz lamented that psychiatry still sticks to symptoms as basis for their diagnosis.
"It would be like using the presence of fever to diagnose a specific infection. We need some means to help us more accurately differentiate mental disorders,” he said.
The project is part of a large-scale study called Bipolar Schizophrenia Network on Intermediate Phenotypes (BSNIP), designed for discovering how schizophrenia and bipolar condition risk is passed on in families and evaluated.
Clementz and the team – focusing on patients of psychosis, a broad-range of mental disorders that cover schizophrenia, bipolar disorder with psychosis, and schizoaffective disorder – created an experiment using neurobiological markers instead of symptoms to help improve existing disease classification methods.
They attempted to “provide neurobiological underpinnings for DSM-type psychosis diagnoses,” referring to the Diagnosis and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder – the criteria and observable symptoms in which many mental health professionals use for diagnosis, including hallucinations, radical personality changes, and delusions.
Over 700 psychosis patients and some of their parents, siblings, or child are recruited in the study and underwent a battery of tests such as MRI scans to analyzed cognitive abilities. The team employed measured for identifying various mental disorder biotypes, which they found more precise than DSM standards.
Clementz reported that their team better predicted a family history of psychosis, structural abnormalities in the brain, and social functioning measures with these biomarkers than with DSM criteria.
The researchers also hoped their experiment will renew psychiatric drug production currently hindered by a deficiency in clear-cut biological targets.
"Psychiatry has relied mostly on serendipity for new drugs," argued Clementz, with all the drugs used for psychosis having largely the same mechanism of action and with no unique therapies for different diagnoses.
Clementz, however, said there is a long way to go in using these measures for new mental diagnostics or drug efficacy evaluation but it is a step closer than when professionals focus on clinical symptoms alone, he added.
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