Biomarkers in Psychiatry

INTRODUCTION: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder with no clear etiopathogenesis. Owing to unique socio cultural milieu of India, it is worthwhile reviewing research on ADHD from India and comparing findings with global research. Thereby, we attempted to provide a comprehensive overview of research on ADHD from India. METHODS: A boolean search of articles published in English from September 1966 to January 2017 on electronic search engines Google Scholar, PubMed, IndMED, MedIND, using the search terms "ADHD", "Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder", "Hyperactivity" ,"Child psychiatry", "Hyperkinetic disorder", "Attention Deficit Disorder", "India"was carried out and peer - reviewed studies conducted among human subjects in India were included for review...

Transient receptor potential canonical 6 (TRPC6) inhibits β-amyloid (Aβ) production. Hyperforin, the TRPC6 agonist, reduces Aβ levels and improves cognitive performance in Alzheimer's disease (AD) models. However, it's unknown whether TRPC6 expression is changed in AD patients. In this case-control study, we measured TRPC6 expression levels in the peripheral blood cells of four independent AD sets from five hospitals and one mild cognitive impairment (MCI) set from a local community (229 AD, 70 MCI, 40 Parkinson disease and 359 controls from China, total n=698) using quantitative real-time PCR assay...

Ferritin, an iron storage and regulation protein, has been associated with Alzheimer's disease (AD); however, it has not been investigated in preclinical AD, detected by neocortical amyloid-β load (NAL), before cognitive impairment. Cross-sectional analyses were carried out for plasma and serum ferritin in participants in the Kerr Anglican Retirement Village Initiative in Aging Health cohort. Subjects were aged 65-90 years and were categorized into high and low NAL groups via positron emission tomography using a standard uptake value ratio cutoff=1...

PURPOSE: An exploratory analysis using proteomic strategies in blood serum of patients with bipolar disorder (BD), and with other psychiatric conditions such as Schizophrenia (SCZ), can provide a better understanding of this disorder, as well as their discrimination based on their proteomic profile. METHODS: The proteomic profile of blood serum samples obtained from patients with BD using lithium or other drugs (N=14), healthy controls, including non-family (HCNF; N=3) and family (HCF; N=9), patients with schizophrenia (SCZ; N=23), and patients using lithium for other psychiatric conditions (OD; N=4) were compared...

Clinical trials in psychiatry inherit methods for design and statistical analysis from evidence-based medicine. However, trials in other clinical disciplines benefit from a more specific relationship between instruments that measure disease state (e.g. biomarkers, clinical signs), the underlying pathology and diagnosis such that primary outcomes can be readily defined. Trials in psychiatry use diagnosis (i.e. a categorical label for a syndrome) as a proxy for the underlying disorder, and outcomes are defined, for example, as a percentage change in a univariate total score on some clinical instrument...

Personalized and precision medicine is gaining recognition due to the limitations by standard diagnosis and treatment; many areas of medicine, from cancer to psychiatry, are moving towards tailored and individualized treatment for patients based on their clinical characteristics and genetic signatures as well as novel imaging techniques. Advances in whole genome sequencing have led to identification of genes involved in a variety of diseases. Moreover, biomarkers indicating severity of disease or susceptibility to treatment are increasingly being characterized...

INTRODUCTION: Bipolar disorder is an often disabling mental illness with a lifetime prevalence of 1%-2%, a high risk of recurrence of manic and depressive episodes, a lifelong elevated risk of suicide and a substantial heritability. The course of illness is frequently characterised by progressive shortening of interepisode intervals with each recurrence and increasing cognitive dysfunction in a subset of individuals with this condition. Clinically, diagnostic boundaries between bipolar disorder and other psychiatric disorders such as unipolar depression are unclear although pharmacological and psychological treatment strategies differ substantially...

There are multiple treatment options for depression, anxiety, psychosis, and other psychiatric disorders, and psychiatry patients are often comorbid with complex, polypharmacy treatment regimens. Unlike cardiovascular disease and diabetes, there are no readily available biomarkers to gauge treatment success with psychotropic medications, often resulting in subjective determination of medication therapy effectiveness. The physiochemical properties of psychiatric medications in general lend themselves to quantitative measurement in blood, offering an avenue to optimize treatment for each patient...

BACKGROUND: Mental and behavioral disorders are the main cause of disability worldwide. However, their diagnosis is challenging due to a lack of reliable biomarkers; current detection is based on structured clinical interviews which can be biased by the patient's recall ability, affective state, changing in temporal frames, etc. While digital platforms have been introduced as a possible solution to this complex problem, there is little evidence on the extent of usability and usefulness of these platforms...

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Bipolar disorder (BD) is a severe, recurrent mood disorder, associated with a significant morbidity and mortality, with high rates of suicides and medical comorbidities. There is a high risk of mood disorders among the first-degree relatives of patients with BD. In the current clinical practice, the diagnosis of BD is made by history taking, interview and behavioural observations, thereby lacking an objective, biological validation. This approach may result in underdiagnosis, misdiagnosis and eventually poorer outcomes...

Schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are neuropsychiatric disorders of unknown origin. It seems that these two disorders share some common etiopathogenic mechanisms including genetic, environmental and inflammatory ones. Reactivation of the human endogenous retrovirus type W (HERV-W) can be a shared element in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, linked to immuno-genetic and environment risk factors. We will present studies that have highlighted the presence of HERV-W in schizophrenic and bipolar disorder patients...

AIM: To verify the prevalence and presence of frailty markers, and their relationship to cognitive function among older adults with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI). METHODS: This was an observational study with transversal analyses. Older adults with aMCI as a result of Alzheimer's disease (n = 40) were compared with healthy controls (n = 26) at the Psychogeriatric Outpatient Unit, Institute and Department of Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine of the University of São Paulo...

Age-associated disease and disability are placing a growing burden on society. However, ageing does not affect people uniformly. Hence, markers of the underlying biological ageing process are needed to help identify people at increased risk of age-associated physical and cognitive impairments and ultimately, death. Here, we present such a biomarker, 'brain-predicted age', derived using structural neuroimaging. Brain-predicted age was calculated using machine-learning analysis, trained on neuroimaging data from a large healthy reference sample (N=2001), then tested in the Lothian Birth Cohort 1936 (N=669), to determine relationships with age-associated functional measures and mortality...

BACKGROUND: Precision medicine is a new and important topic in psychiatry. Psychiatry has not yet benefited from the advanced diagnostic and therapeutic technologies that form an integral part of other clinical specialties. Thus, the vision of precision medicine as applied to psychiatry - 'precision psychiatry' - promises to be even more transformative than in other fields of medicine, which have already lessened the translational gap. DISCUSSION: Herein, we describe 'precision psychiatry' and how its several implications promise to transform the psychiatric landscape...

Schizophrenia is a highly heritable, chronic, severe, disabling neurodevelopmental brain disorder with a heterogeneous genetic and neurobiological background, which is still poorly understood. To allow better diagnostic procedures and therapeutic strategies in schizophrenia patients, use of easy accessible biomarkers is suggested. The most frequently used biomarkers in schizophrenia are those associated with the neuroimmune and neuroendocrine system, metabolism, different neurotransmitter systems and neurotrophic factors...

As substantial efforts are being made to identify biological markers of psychiatric illnesses, it is becoming clear that clinically useful accuracy will require larger sets of readouts that potentially span different technological platforms. For discovery of proteomic biomarkers, simultaneous measurement of analytes in small sample quantities has developed into a widely used technology of similar quality as the respective single-plex assays. Multiplex assay systems therefore hold promise for biomarker discovery and development in many complex disease areas including psychiatry...

During this decade, breakthrough conceptual shifts have commenced to emerge in the field of Alzheimer's disease (AD) recognizing risk factors and the non-linear dynamic continuum of complex pathophysiologies amongst a wide dimensional spectrum of multi-factorial brain proteinopathies/neurodegenerative diseases. As is the case in most fields of medicine, substantial advancements in detecting, treating and preventing AD will likely evolve from the generation and implementation of a systematic precision medicine strategy...

After intense scientific exploration and more than a decade of failed trials, Alzheimer's disease (AD) remains a fatal global epidemic. A traditional research and drug development paradigm continues to target heterogeneous late-stage clinically phenotyped patients with single 'magic bullet' drugs. Here, we propose that it is time for a paradigm shift towards the implementation of precision medicine (PM) for enhanced risk screening, detection, treatment, and prevention of AD. The overarching structure of how PM for AD can be achieved will be provided through the convergence of breakthrough technological advances, including big data science, systems biology, genomic sequencing, blood-based biomarkers, integrated disease modeling and P4 medicine...

We review the concept of endophenotype, and its relationship with related terms in use in the scientific literature, including "biomarker" and "intermediate phenotype". We then explain the importance of the concept in current psychiatry research. Specifically, we focus in the potential importance of endophenotypes in both disentangling the genetic causes, and improving the dimensional and pathophysiologic definition, of psychiatric nosological categories. After delineating which types of variables could constitute valid endophenotypes, we describe efforts in defining neurobiological signatures of social cognitive deficits in schizophrenia as an example with potential heuristic value...