Biomarkers in Psychiatry for Mental Health and Wellbeing
Clinical and prognostic biomarkers in psychiatry may be used to identify patients more likely to develop a clinical event or disease progression.
In recent years, a concerted effort has been made to identify mental health biomarkers as potential tools for improving responses to psychiatric disorders.
Mental issues are categorised by diagnostic categories with a broad list of symptoms and prognostic causes.
As such, there is significant variety in how these mental illnesses can arise and present themselves in patients.
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This fact, together with patchy knowledge around the neurochemical alterations that can underlie mental health issues, contributes to the limited efficacy of pharmacological options.
The identification of relevant biomarkers in psychiatry could one day be essential to assisting diagnosis through the development of markers that allow for the stratification of groups within the syndrome.
By identifying factors predicting treatment response, researchers could be able to facilitate the discovery of new, effective treatments, reducing trial-and-error switches of medications.
This would represent a crucial step towards the establishment of greater personalised medicine for mental health issues.
Applications of Clinical and Prognostic Biomarkers in Psychiatry
Advances in psychiatry and research centred on the human brain – along with the advent of new technologies such as ‘omics’ technologies – offer the opportunity for augmented mental health treatment.
As an example, the precise identification of distinct biomarkers for psychiatric disorders could enable a psychiatrist to tailor therapies towards individuals affected by them.
Imaging biomarkers can also determine which pharmacological treatments for major depressive disorder (MDD) are effective or ineffective for specific individuals who have already been diagnosed.
These approaches could be used to measure and monitor responses to cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), or deep brain stimulation (DBS).
Here, the aim would be to ameliorate the problem of treatment resistance in depression: patients who fail to respond to antidepressant medication may respond to different forms of neuromodulation.
Biomarkers specific to each patient’s brain could determine which of these interventions would be more likely to modulate neural and mental function, providing a tailored approach to treatment with a higher likelihood of a successful outcome.
Further down the line, the potential is there for this approach to guide interventions and control other disorders.
There is uncertainty about the role of these biological signatures in neural pathophysiology, and their clinical significance has yet to be firmly established.
Still, the potential is there for biomarkers in biological psychiatry to overcome the challenges associated with depression, bipolar disorder, and generalised anxiety.
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