Blood test looks promising in diagnosing depression

Even among psychiatric disorders, depression is a difficult disease to diagnose. Its causes remain a mystery, its symptoms can't be defined with precision, and treatments are spotty at best.

But that may soon change. Scientists are looking for ways to identify patients with depression as reliably as they diagnose cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancer. A new study takes a significant, though preliminary, step in that direction by demonstrating that a simple blood test can distinguish between people who are depressed and those who are not.

The test examined a panel of 28 biological markers that circulate in the bloodstream and found that 11 of them could predict the presence of depression at accuracy levels that ranged from medium to large. And if that were not remarkable enough, researchers pulled off this feat in a group of teenagers, whose angst often defies all efforts at classification.

The study, published online Tuesday in the journal Translational Psychiatry, offers hope that doctors can do a better job of helping adolescents whose mood difficulties go beyond those of typical teens, and whose lifelong prospects could be greatly improved by early treatment. What's more, by using objective data to diagnose mental pain, researchers hope to remove the stigma that often prevents patients from reaching out to doctors.

http://www.latimes.com/health/la-he-depression-blood-test-20120418,0,6787106.story