While suicide remains a mystifying phenomenon that is disastrous and frequently, new research indicates that biomarkers in the blood could signal suicide danger. If the research comes to fruition, a straightforward blood test could offer an objective prediction of suicidal inclinations, hopefully saving lives, according to the study.
Researchers in the Indiana University School of Medicine (IUSM) assembled on previous research on blood biomarkers that signal mood disorders to recognize a set of blood biomarkers for suicide risk. They then tested groups with high risk of suicide and also the blood of these who had already committed suicide, finding the biomarkers correlated with risk, especially biomarker SAT1 (spermidien/spermine N1???acetyltransferase 1).
“There are individuals who will not show they are having suicidal thoughts when you ask them, who subsequently commit it and there’s nothing you certainly can do about it,” study author Alexander Niculescu III, MD, PhD, associate professor at IUSM said in a statement. Over one million individuals die from suicide worldwide each year, the researchers noted.
“Psychiatry is really in desperate need of biological mark,” said Edward Short, Phd, professor of medical history and medicine at the University of Toronto. Short said this is a promising development, but noted that it’s not the first biological evaluation to try and predict suicide. The dexamethasone suppression test was utilized in the 1970s and 1980s, as research workers realized it was really only tracking melancholic melancholy, though it fell from favor. These researchers must establish their test is more robust, Short said.
By studying nine male patients who have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, the researchers started. They analyzed these patients blood while also tracking their shifts in suicidal thoughts. The biomarkers correlated with increases in suicidal thoughts.
Next, at a local coroner’s office, 9 male subjects who had committed suicide were identified by the researchers, and tested their blood. The predicted biomarkers were significantly higher in these subjects blood, in line with the study
The researchers subsequently followed and tested two different groups — 42 men who have been bipolar and 46 men with psychosis — and found that not only did raised degrees of the biomarkers indicate future risk of suicide, but the guys also had higher biomarker amounts if they had a history of hospitalizations as a result of suicide danger or efforts. This may indicate that the biomarkers predict not only danger that is immediate, but long term risk of suicide, the researchers noted.
The evaluation will need to be performed on people who are not depressed and do not have suicide risk, Short noted.
The researchers acknowledged that this really is only the initial step in creating an objective blood test that might help recognize suicide threat and potentially correctly identifying these biomarkers. The areas were all male and primarily Caucasian, in part since they were working together with the Veterans Affairs Medical Center and thus the work needs to be replicated on inhabitants that are wider. Furthermore, focusing on individuals with bipolar disorder and psychosis may represent a distinctively impulsive population, meriting additional research.
