Blood tests have long been the diagnostic standard for diagnosing teenage diseases, such as mono and diabetes. Now researchers have developed a blood test that can diagnose depression in teens, a step they hope will lead to a better way to identify the disorder in young people.
Currently, diagnosing depression depends entirely on a patient's willingness to report symptoms -- and a doctor's ability to interpret them. For teens, the diagnosis is particularly challenging, given the natural emotional ups and downs of adolescence.
"Teenagers are extraordinarily vulnerable to depression," said Eva Redei, author of the study and a professor of psychiatry and behavioral medicine at the Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. "And there are no objective, biological measures for evaluating them for depression."
In the study, published today in the journal Translational Psychiatry, Redei and her team developed a test that looks for markers in the blood of teens with major depressive disorder. By studying rats that had genetic and environmental predispositions for depression, the researchers were able to pinpoint 26 markers of major depression.
They looked for these markers in the blood of 28 human teenagers, ages 15 to 19, half with depression and half without. They found that 11 of the markers showed up in the depressed teens but not in teens without depression.
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