Researchers discover a blood test for suicide risk + MORE Jul 30th

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Diagnosing a patient’s risk for suicide is notoriously tricky, and subjective. “Current methods involve asking someone, ‘Are you suicidal?’” says Zachary Kaminsky, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “Some people won’t answer truthfully,” and doctors might miss other cues. In the future, it could come down to a simple blood test. Kaminsky and his colleagues have pinpointed a change in one human gene that seems to indicate an elevated risk for suicide.
Kaminsky, who was formerly based at the University of Toronto, studies epigenetics, “or how the environment, and in this case stress, changes your genes,” he explains. “And that’s what we found.” In the new study, published in The American Journal of Psychiatry, he and his team landed on a single gene: SKA2, which is expressed in the prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain involved in impulse control and emotion regulation), and plays an important role in how the brain responds to stress hormones…

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Diagnosing a patient’s risk for suicide is notoriously tricky, and subjective. “Current methods involve asking someone, ‘Are you suicidal?’” says Zachary Kaminsky, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “Some people won’t answer truthfully,” and doctors might miss other cues. In the future, it could come down to a simple blood test. Kaminsky and his colleagues have pinpointed a change in one human gene that seems to indicate an elevated risk for suicide.
Kaminsky, who was formerly based at the University of Toronto, studies epigenetics, “or how the environment, and in this case stress, changes your genes,” he explains. “And that’s what we found.” In the new study, published in The American Journal of Psychiatry, he and his team landed on a single gene: SKA2, which is expressed in the prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain involved in impulse control and emotion regulation), and plays an important role in how the brain responds to stress hormones…