What Is a Mental Biomarker - Reynolds Clinics

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The Basic But Accurate Guide To Mental Biomarkers

There is much information you can learn today about mental biomarkers, but how many of that new information is really relevant and accurate? In this article, we will try to examine some of the more important facts, knowledge, and keywords that you may want to familiarize if you’re going to learn more information about biomarkers. Let’s get started.

Mental health in Scrabble tiles

How Mental Biomarkers Is Done

The new technologies we have are auspicious tools to get the results we want. In the field of medicine, mental biomarkers are such tools. These are the tools that can help map the brain and rewire the broken parts. These are the tools that can help find the new therapy for mental illnesses. These are the tools that can help find new creative solutions to mental problems. But what are they?

Mental biomarkers are any measurable indicator that shows what the state of the person is. These biomarkers can help detect suicidal tendencies, sometimes reaching to about 95% accuracy. Here are the actual steps on how mental biomarkers are done in actual practice:

  1. The first step in getting one’s mental biomarkers is the physician gets the blood samples of the patients. Before doctors can diagnose and find out the causes of mental health issues, these blood samples should be taken first, along with the patient’s filled-out form that describes their thoughts and feelings.
  2. The statements on the form that the patient gave would then be coded to match the areas of the brain where those feelings and thoughts are triggered or arise.
  3. The next stop would be the installation of the electrode system. How this works is that a cap that’s studded with 19 electrodes will be installed in the various lobes of the patient’s brain.
    This electrode system is meant to measure the activity in various lobes of the brain. The physician will set a baseline score or the resting state  of the brain. The psychiatrist will then send prompts to the patient and see the patient’s reactions.
  4. There will then be a set of belt and sensors attached to the different fingers of the patient in order to measure the various functions controlled unconsciously by the peripheral nervous system. These indicators include the patient’s breathing rate, perspiration and heart rate.
  5. When the psychiatrist finds out where the problematic areas of the brain are using the data gathered from the sensors and EEG, the psychiatrist will play a series of images to recalibrate the problematic brain areas and repair the dysfunction.

Biological Analysis

What makes mental biomarkers stand out from the rest of the techniques out there is that it’s more auspicious in detecting psychological issues with more accuracy. This is because of the focus on biology. Mental biomarkers can detect an illness and prevent it because of a person’s biological physique. Instead of symptoms, it’s the genetic makeup that they focus.

The Boost

In 2013, this new but slightly controversial treatment process got a boost when the National Institute of Mental Health shifted its focus. From focusing on symptoms, the government agency would now focus on the mental biomarkers. They would no longer fund research on studies on the symptoms to find out the answers. Doctors who believe that talk therapy is key in treating mental illnesses would be then forced to use biomarkers to find the remedies.

Two Schools of Treatment

Doctors who believe in different approaches to mental health treatment are bellicose about the new changes in the focus of treatment. Many psychiatrists think that talk therapy is still most effective, while other psychiatrists are more focused on the biological wiring of the patient.

Focus On The Cause, Not Symptoms

The mental biomarkers used today to help cure mental illnesses are trying to focus on the cause of the problem, not just the symptoms. Today, common medicine for illness such as SSRI are just for the symptoms. They are there to ease the suffering of the patient. They are not there to rewire the causes. Mental biomarkers try to address that.

Summary and Conclusion

There are many benefits today of mental biomarkers, and in this article, you learned what they are and how they can affect the treatment of mental illness. We hope that you learned a lot from this piece to let you know what to expect in the innovation found in research today.

It’s also accurate to say that there are more kinds of biomarkers out there that are not yet known at the moment and researchers still have a long way to go to satisfy the answers.