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(Ivanhoe Newswire) — Blood testing for mood disorders may help the medical community come up with better treatments for the conditions.

Currently, there are no blood tests for mood disorders. And relying on patients to rate the severity of their symptoms and on the clinicians’ impression may limit the chances of effective treatment and new drug development.

Researchers from Indiana University School of Medicine instead propose a new way to help identify blood biomarkers to help determine mood state.

The study finds topping the list of candidate blood biomarker genes are five genes involved in myelination and six genes involved in growth factor signaling. All of them have been shown to have differential expression in the brains of patients with mood disorders. A predictive score based on a panel of ten top candidate biomarkers — five for high mood, five for low mood — shows sensitivity and specificity for high mood and low mood states, in two separate studies.

The research suggests blood biomarkers may offer an unexpectedly informative view of brain functioning and disease state. The results also show an intriguing overlap between genes involved in cancer biology and those involved in mood regulation.

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SOURCE: Molecular Psychiatry, published online Feb. 26, 2008

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