NEW APP AND BLOOD TEST CAN PREDICT SUICIDE RISK

ONE of the most promising – and most terrifying – areas of medical research these days is technology designed to try to guess your mental health and predict what you will do next.

Proponents of such tools say they’ll help doctors get to individuals in need faster and prevent tragedies like suicide, while others fear that such developments will lead to the nightmarish future of Minority Report.

Scientists took a major step forward in predictive technology last week with the development of a system of blood tests and an app that they say can predict with more than 90 percent accuracy whether someone will start thinking about suicide or attempt it.

In a study, researchers at Indiana University School of Medicine presented details of an app that measures mood and anxiety and that asks people a series of questions about life issues, things like: How high is your physical energy and the amount of moving about that you feel like doing right now? How good to you feel about yourself and your accomplishments right now? How uncertain about things do you feel right now?

They purposely avoided asking any questions about suicide directly.

Writing in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, they wrote: “One cannot always ask individuals if they are suicidal, as desire not to be stopped or future impulsive changes of mind may make their self-report of feelings, thoughts and plans to be unreliable.”

The researchers separately studied a group of 217 males who had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, schizophrenia and other psychiatric issues. About 20 percent went from no suicidal thoughts to a high level of suicidal thoughts while they were being seen at a clinic at the university. By analysing their blood samples, the researchers were able to identify RNA biomarkers that appeared to predict suicidal thinking.

They wrote that it’s unclear how well the biomarkers would work in the larger population, but that the app is ready to be deployed and tested on a wider group in realworld settings. – The Washington Post