Russian scientists have developed a blood test for mental illness

Scientists from Skoltech, together with colleagues from medical centers and psychiatric hospitals, said that blood tests can distinguish healthy people from patients with psychiatric diagnoses, as well as distinguish between clinical depression and schizophrenia. The study was published in the scientific journal MDPI on September 24.

"With the introduction of objective biological markers of diseases into psychiatry, doctors will receive previously inaccessible tools that will complement their subjective assessment. In addition, biomarkers will make it possible to detect diseases earlier," said Anna Tkacheva, one of the authors of the work, a researcher at the Vladimir Zelman Skoltech Center for Neurobiology and Neurorehabilitation, her words are quoted in the institute's Telegram channel.

The researchers analyzed the blood plasma of 416 patients with psychotic and affective disorders and 272 healthy volunteers from Moscow and Ufa. Lipid profiles were obtained using mass spectrometry.: It turned out that the levels of 107 lipids in patients significantly deviate from the norm, and 37 more specifically change with one of the diagnoses, the Newspaper clarifies.Ru». Based on this data, the researchers trained a machine learning algorithm that was able to distinguish between depression and schizophrenia with 83% accuracy.

"We have shown that the blood lipid profile can not only detect the presence of mental illness, but also distinguish between two classes of disorders — schizophrenic and depressive," Anastasia Golubova, a co—author of the work, a graduate student at Skoltech, told the publication.

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Earlier, on September 5, Vsevolod Severtsev, PhD, an assistant at the Department of Psychiatry and Narcology at Sechenov University, said that extracellular vesicles could become a key tool for early diagnosis of depression and addictions. According to him, new approaches to the treatment of such disorders may be developed in the future.

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