Want to know if your family member is suicidal? There may be a blood test for that.
Researchers identified a series of RNA biomarkers that could indicate a higher tendency towards suicide, a Indiana University press release reported.
The biomarkers were found at significantly higher concentration in people who had committed suicide and males with bipolar disorder involving suicidal thoughts.
"Suicide is a big problem in psychiatry. It's a big problem in the civilian realm, it's a big problem in the military realm and there are no objective markers," principal investigator Alexander B. Niculescu III, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of psychiatry and medical neuroscience at the IU School of Medicine and development investigator at the Richard L. Roudebush Veterans Affairs Medical Center, said. "There are people who will not reveal they are having suicidal thoughts when you ask them, who then commit it and there's nothing you can do about it. We need better ways to identify, intervene and prevent these tragic cases."
Niculescu believes the method could be used to detect suicidal tendencies even in the earliest stages.
The research team took blood samples from bipolar patients every three to six months. The study lasted for three years. They also tested patients that had a rapid increase in suicidal thoughts.
The marker SAT1 was the strongest "signal" for indicating the level of suicidal symptoms.
After finding a correlation between the marker and suicidal thoughts in bipolar patients, the team conducted blood tests on people who had committed suicide. The researchers found high levels of the biological marker.
Finally, the team sampled the blood of two additional groups of patients, and found a high level of the marker increased risk of future suicide-related hospitalization.
"This suggests that these markers reflect more than just a current state of high risk, but could be trait markers that correlate with long term risk," Niculescu said.
All of the study subjects were male, which limits the results of the research.
"There could be gender differences. We would also like to conduct more extensive, normative studies, in the population at large," Niculescu, said.
The researcher hopes to conduct a similar study on females in the future, as well as non-bipolar people who carry out more deliberate suicides.
WATCH:
