Earlier this month, researchers released a study showing that they had found a way to test for depression risk with a simple blood test. A new study has also found a way to test for psychosis risk with a blood test. This means that soon, it may be possible to identify psychosis and schizophrenia risk early with a simple test. Since early diagnosis is key in treating and even preventing mental illness, and since psychosis often goes unidentified, this is a very important discovery in the psychiatric landscape.
A research team, led by Diana Perkins, M.D., found that it could identify psychosis risk by testing the blood for hormone and immune system imbalance and oxidative stress. Perkins is a medical director for the University of North Carolina's Outreach and Support Intervention Services (OASIS) program to aid people with schizophrenia.
"While further research is required before this blood test could be clinically available, these results provide evidence regarding the fundamental nature of schizophrenia, and point towards novel pathways that could be targets for preventative interventions," Perkins said.
The study consisted of 32 patients who were at risk for psychosis. The team followed them over two years and was able to accurately identify the patients who developed psychosis. The researchers used 15 markers in the blood called analytes to identify the presence of psychosis.
The patients from this study who were diagnosed with psychosis had several different mental illnesses, including schizophrenia, unspecified psychosis, major depression, bipolar disorder and schizoaffective disorder.
More research needs to be done on this study before its results can be verified, but these results are very interesting, and very promising for future treatment or prevention of psychosis.
"Modern, computer-based methods can readily discover seemingly clear patterns from nonsensical data," said Clark Jeffries, one of the co-authors. "Added to that, scientific results from studies of complex disorders like schizophrenia can be confounded by many hidden dependencies. Thus, stringent testing is necessary to build a useful classifier. We did that."
This study comes in the wake of another study earlier this month that was able to accurately identify schizophrenia risk by studying DNA. Not everyone who has psychosis is schizophrenic, but psychosis is one of the key symptoms of schizophrenia. That study on schizophrenia found 42 clusters of genetic variations associated with the disorder.
Another study earlier this month found a way to predict depression risk with a high degree of accuracy using a blood test that searched for several RNA markers in the blood.
