Ten or 20 years from now, we will be sending our patients to the laboratory to characterize them in terms of genetic polymorphisms and/or to an imaging laboratory. Then based on those findings, and on the clinical presentation of the patient, we will be able to do what we can’t do right now, which is […]
Any scientist with access to the news is excited by the possibilities implicit in the amazing advances in genetics research in the recent decade, even up here in Georgia’s Appalachia. And each scientist puts their own twist on what might be up ahead. In Psychiatry, genetic markers have long been suspected to play a role […]
While I bandy about the trinity of trendy paradigms [evidence-based medicine, translational medicine, and personalized medicine], I’m not really being precise about the nature of my complaints. Like all of us, I get caught up in the obvious – the profit motives of the pharmaceutical industry that pervade modern psychiatry and its academy, the overgrowth […]
Who could forget TerryTune’s Mighty Mouse, the Superhero from the 1940s? Well he’s urgently needed in TarryTown NY to save the mice from PsychoGenics Inc. PsychoGenics Inc, a leader in preclinical neurobiology and in the provision of CNS drug discovery solutions, works with pharmaceutical companies and not-for-profit organizations to validate targets and select compounds to […]
This business of "biomarkers" is a slippery slope. I think in the back of my mind, I’ve always retained an envy for my old medical specialty – rheumatology. Like Psychiatry, the disorders are heavily weighted towards ‘diseases of unknown etiology’ diagnosed with ‘criteria.’ But as a rheumatologist, we had biomarkers [LE prep, ANA, RA, sed […]
It just doesn’t seem like it was just 30 years ago that dBase came into our lives – WordStar, VisiCalc, and dBase on a PC with a green screen. In spite of their ubiquity now, the term "database" still hasn’t lost all of its magic. It holds out the promise of untold discovery – like […]
Depression will be the second leading contributor to the burden of disease by 2020. There is therefore an urgent need to identify objective indicators of risk for depression, and to understand their link to underlying biological mechanisms and treatment. To date, candidate risk markers such as genetic polymorphisms, vulnerability to stress, personality traits, and alterations […]
Like its recent fore-runners, evidence-based medicine and translational medicine, personalized medicine is a pretty good concept. They are all terms to describe some way to improve something that’s wrong with the way things are now, or the way they have been in the past. As with almost any such new idea, there are twists and […]
In my last post, I tried to synopsize the first two of Brain Resource‘s products – brain training and clinician support tools built from web-based instruments. Now its time to move up several notches to their third product[s] which they gather under the heading research solutions. In this instance, we’ll have to move beyond the […]
Just in case you passed on the opportunity to view the BRAINnet videos last time, here they are again to emphasize their importance in understanding what the new term Personalized Medicine is all about: • The Mayflower [30 minutes]: • Standardized Assessments [1 minute]: • Dr. Evian Gordon [10 minutes]: • The Mayflower Action Group […]