Slashdot is all abuzz about an article submission where a bunch of researchers from Hebrew University in Israel are claiming they have created a simple blood test that can test for “anxiety” within a few hours. I read the article twice and am amazed …
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How about an Objective diagnosis?
The Problem comes when a legal issue arises. Either side can always get a trained mental health professional to contradict the Other side’s trained mental health professional.
Always.
A 60 second Pubmed search using the keyword ‘Soreq’ would have found an extract (http://tinyurl.com/79oh5) for:
Sklan EH et al
Acetylcholinesterase/paraoxonase genotype and expression predict anxiety scores in Health, Risk Factors, Exercise Training, and Genetics study.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2004 Apr 13;101(15):5512-7. Epub
plus two links (http://tinyurl.com/bjwze & http://tinyurl.com/89zp2) to the full text of this study.
As for your claim that any “mental health professional” can fairly accurately diagnose an anxiety disorder within an hour, perhaps so, but most anxiety or mood disorder patients never get to see one, they consult a PCP who are much less proficient. Even ER doctors miss anxiety disorders most of the time even though a significant number of the people they see are in the ER because of one. Generally, psychiatric disorders are diagnosed when all possible “physical” illnesses have been considered and ruled out after a battery of pathology tests, x-rays and scans. Even then many doctors aren’t completely sure and more importantly, neither are their patients.
I don’t know if this diagnostic test works or not, but if it does I believe it will be of great benefit.
Some may argue there are few objective diagnoses, even in medicine. That’s why legal cases involving health decisions and diseases also often have “dueling” docs. A lab test doesn’t bring an end to the subjective interpretation of test results, questions about blood draws, etc.
60 seconds? Sorry, that wasn’t at all obvious to me (and I’m sure to many others). And while I respect the National Academy of Science, we all know that epubs of such proceedings are hardly of the same (or one might argue, even similar) caliber than the NEJM or such. But it’s good to see something more than a press interview from this team.
I don’t know that most people who have anxiety and mood disorders never get to see a mental health professional. If you could point me to the data that illustrate that, I’d be happy to agree. But to suggest that “most” psychiatric disorders are only diagnosed after all possible physical causes have been ruled out is to live in a very limited world. In every clinical setting I was ever in (community mental health, university counseling, general private practice, etc.), physical ailments were almost never ruled out with any type of formal health exam or physical. That would be the exception, not the rule.
Does anyone know if this actually happened, and if so how a random person in the US can go about getting this test?
The interesting thing from my perspective is that this should very directly tell someone how sensitive they are to certain classes of cholinesterase inhibiting pesticides in the food supply. If the PON1 activity level is low and/or the PON1 genotype encodes for a less effective version, then your cholinesterase will be inhibited when you ingest these pesticides much more so than it would be for someone with a more active and/or effective PON1 genotype/phenotype.
It may be the cholinesterase inhibition resulting from ingesting such pesticides by at-risk individuals that leads to the increased incidence of anxiety identified by Dr. Soreq et. al. For such individuals, strict avoidance of the pesticides by eating only organic foods may help with the anxiety and other symptoms of chronic cholinesterase inhibition.
There are other naturally occuring cholinesterase inhibitors in certain food crops, particularly those in the nightshade family (potato, tomato, peppers, eggplant, etc.). I have been researching why ingestion of such plants causes symptoms of cholinesterase inhibition, like anxiety, for some individuals, but not for others.
So far I have been unable to determine if PON1 also plays a role with those substances. However, Dr. Norman Childers has found that people who have problems with the nightshade toxins seem to also have problems with these pesticides. Being able to start testing the PON1/AChE/BuChE genotype and enzyme levels in people who are known to have problems with the nightshade toxins would be a good start on figuring this out.
The good news is that if people had a test to find out if they are sensitive to these substances, it is possible through diet modification to reduce the symptoms of chronic cholinesterase inhibitor poisioning and benefit from improved quality of life. Now we just need the test. Hopefully this test really exists as a starting point!