Do you want to know how to find out if you or a loved one has depression or not? Normally, whether a person has depression or not is determined by their answers to a questionnaire that covers the symptoms of depression. Well, that may be a thing of the past soon. Researchers say they may have come up with a way to accurately determine the presence of depression. This is exciting not just for the detection of depression but also because it could prove to be an important step that leads to more effective treatments being discovered as well.
Researchers say they have developed a blood test that may reliably detect depression.
If the test continues to perform well in studies, experts say it could become one of the first objective ways to look for depression, which affects nearly 1 in 10 American adults.
“Psychiatry is a field that is begging for tests because all of our diagnoses, for the most part, are based on clinical assessments, and clinical assessments are very subjective and can be biased,” says Jennifer L. Payne, MD, a psychiatrist and co-director of the Mood Disorders Center at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.
Payne reviewed the study for WebMD but was not involved in the research, which is published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.
“We’d love to have tests that tell us if someone has a particular illness or not,” she says. “This is a very nice step in that direction, but there’s a heck of a lot more work to be done before this is used as a clinical test for major depression.”
Study Results ‘Quite Exciting’
The new test, called MDDScore, was developed by a company called Ridge Diagnostics. And it’s not the only objective test for depression under study. In 2010, the company Rules-Based Medicine, which is headquartered in Austin, Texas, began offering a blood test that checks for recent-onset schizophrenia. The company is reportedly tweaking that test to make a version that looks for depression….More at Blood Test May Help Diagnose Depression | FYI BeHealthy
Until this test becomes widely used and available, you can check your own signs and symptoms of depression against the list of well-known ones. If you want to know it with the help of a health professional, you can. A health care professional can not only help determine if you have depression or not but they can also help you overcome it through a treatment program tailored specifically for you and your condition.
A study from Northwestern University about teens doing blood testing.
“Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just… http://t.co/Lya7q9u9
— DrJosefina (Dr. Josefina ) (@DrJosefina) Tue Aug 14 2012
