Why haven’t we come up with a biomarker test for clinical depression yet?
In: Biology
We’re working on it; and a lot of progress has been made.
Not every condition has glaringly obvious signs of its presence in the body. Not every condition can use one set of markers
So the issue is two fold – which markers do we use in testing and how much commonality exists across all patients.
A test isn’t good if it’ll only work in a small number of positive cases
Depression is likely an umbrella term that covers a wide variety of underlying conditions, and we don’t have a well founuded model of what depression is, so don’t really konw what to test for.
In studies there are various markers associated with depression, worse mitocohdrial health, smaller brain volume, worse brain connectivity, lower BDNF levels, etc.(all of which are improved by exercise). But a problem with that is they are hard/expensive/impracticle to test. Then while you can observe associations, those associations might not be strong enough to use as a test.
Why would there be such a thing? A biomarker is a gene, molecule or characteristic by which a disease can be identified, separating out clinical depression from varying body processes in the normal scale is going to be impossible.
Mostly because we don’t know what biomarkers to test yet. We might have some potential biomarkers, but it’s not yet clear how they work and what combination of them indicates depression. It’s very important that we get it very accurate because misdiagnosing can be a big issue.
1. There may not be a specific bio marker for what currently gets diagnosed as clinical depression.
2. What we call clinical depression may be a variety of different problems with a common side effect.
3. Finding bio markers is hard
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