Today, the prevalence of depression in adults and children is growing at an alarming rate, but the capabilities of modern medicine are still limited. Scientists agree that depression has many causes and genetics plays an important role in the development of mental disorders. Since 2017, an international team of researchers has studied the genetic characteristics of depression in thousands of patients from 29 countries and discovered about 300 new genetic variants associated with the diagnosis. The results are published on the website of the Berghof Medical Research Institute.
In total, the scientists analyzed data from 680,000 patients and compared it with data from 4 million healthy people. This helped to increase the number of genetic variants of predisposition to depression almost twofold: now scientists know of 697 depression biomarkers in the genome.
It is known that each genetic variant has a small impact on the risk of depression, but several variants together carry a higher probability of developing the disease. Now scientists have the opportunity to conduct testing on the largest database, which should significantly improve the quality of diagnosis and treatment of depression. For example, understanding the involvement of certain genes, it is possible to adapt existing drugs for the treatment of depression or develop new ones for previously unknown targets.
Recently, other scientists have presented AI that can detect depression in five minutes with 97% accuracy. The diagnosis is made by voice and brain activity analysis.