A Blood Test for Anxiety?

Researchers just made a blood test for anxiety. It’s the latest development in a project that might help improve how we treat mental health conditions…

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#shorts #tech #science #medicine

[Kaeinlya]

I think it's very telling that as a chronically ill person, my immediate thought was there might finally be some hope that everything can't immediately be blamed on anxiety.

[ForburyLion]

How quickly do the markers appear? - Asking for a friend who gets anxious about blood tests and needles

[annahasket]

That is the greatest thing! I hope it becomes common knowledge enough - such a step to break stigma against people with mental issues and actually help them get better

[yoshida_chad]

i should show this to my mother who don't even consider mental illness as an illness

[GBEZ]

Just wanted to pop on and let you know how much I really appreciate your content. I love the stories you're focusing on and your presentation is outstanding. Thanks for being a wonderful addition to science media!

[wisper]

I mean I'm all for working toward better mental health, I've struggled with anxiety and depression for years, but not only would having blood drawn severely increase my anxiety, but I also don't think I need blood drawn to figure out that I feel extremely and irrationally afraid for little to no reason

[stephaniecohn]

This concerns me because I’d imagine that many occurrences can have similar results, like someone with trauma who isn’t experiencing anxiety may be misdiagnosed as such, which happens often enough already

[KatharineMongrain]

That's frigging awesome! I developed severe anxiety, and let me tell you it has been a struggle! So hard because I didn't grow up with it, and it's really affected how my life has been since.

[tywinderbaum]

This is seriously concerning. It's already incredibly common to find empirist psychiatrist who will completely ignore the patient's actual symptoms because "the test" (both brain waves and blood tests in my case) say you're fine. This happens with lots of physical illnesses, so imagine how much it would happen with mental ones, so often dismissed (where I'm from anyway).

[tinydancer]

It feels weird to talk to a doctor about anxiety as I believed I didn’t have it and had some other condition… finally after being on meds that made me feel like I was high I realized that it’s how normal people feel all the time. It would’ve been helpful for me to just get the blood test tho because it was hard for me to bring up my symptoms to my doctor

[santiagocruz]

It could slow increase diagnoses and isolate treatment to one form of anxiety. Something exciting that should be utilized with caution.

[FireflyFanatic]

I can only shudder to imagine the people who might one day be refused care because they don’t have the rna markers for whatever specific form of anxiety this test targets. There are so many different forms and reasons for anxiety, I hope that this doesn’t cause some of us to be denied access to treatment.

[Mouserocksnerd]

As someone who has been struggling with anxiety for a long time and struggling to mentally accept it and treat it, learning that there's a physical marker for it feels so validating. ❤

[math]

As someone who's always tried his hardest for any grade, I'm very glad to have finally found one I'm sure to score over 100% 😊😊😊

[doublehuman]

“Their current state of anxiety” makes it sound like it’s the anxiety everyone feels time to time rather than the thing some do all the time, so how do you get an accurate sample when getting the sample of blood would likely cause anxiety?

[Lute.Turtle]

The problem I see with it is if someone has anxiety about needles and it is to measure what their current anxiety level is, it could skew the results.

[commentbot]

I hope this becomes the case for every disorder. I am not a good judge of my symptoms and others are worse lmao.

[oliviaocasain]

Yessss as a neuroscientist dedicated to treating mood disorders this is an exciting first step into finding biomarkers for psychiatric illness! Its incredible how far we've come in such little time.

[amycox]

Have we considered how test scores could be affected by acute events that aren’t indicative of a patients usual anxiety level like, say….. getting a needle stuck into your arm?



Edit: I’m aware that as scientists, they most likely thought of it. I was joking.

[Thelongestshrimp]

As the guy with the single most neurological conditions this is awesome