{"id":50106,"date":"2014-09-21T21:06:42","date_gmt":"2014-09-22T01:06:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/?p=50106"},"modified":"2014-09-22T08:59:31","modified_gmt":"2014-09-22T12:59:31","slug":"a-buddy-system","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2014\/09\/21\/a-buddy-system\/","title":{"rendered":"a buddy system…"},"content":{"rendered":"
"So what we wanted to do is to find a diagnostic test that can be done in any clinical laboratory whereby a patient can go to the doctor and the doctor can send blood to the clinical laboratory that can help the physician to decide if the patient is clinically depressed or not. It will help them to live better lives, but it also would help to eliminate the stigma, because if there is an objective measure, a blood test, that can tell whether you are depressed or not, that it’s not likely that anyone can tell you ‘Oh, just get over it.’ In addition to eliminating the stigma, and of course to help the physician make a correct diagnosis, we are also helping society altogether, as depression is going to be the number one burden in the world by 2030.<\/em>"<\/div>\n
Eva Redei, PhD,<\/font><\/strong><\/em> Blood test for depression to reduce stigma<\/a><\/em><\/div>\n

When I looked at Blood transcriptomic biomarkers in adult primary care patients with major depressive disorder undergoing cognitive behavioral therapy<\/a> on Friday [see don’t ask, don’t tell…<\/a>], I read the write up in TIME Magazine<\/a>, and linked the one in the  Chicago Tribune<\/a>, but I hadn’t gone to the site. It was a videotaped interview with Eva Redei, PhD, the senior author. I transcribed it [above] thinking I wanted to write about it. It’s the kind of exaggerating I just hate. But once I heard it, I went back and looked at the article itself. In don’t ask, don’t tell… <\/a>, I had been sarcastic: my blog title, their small sample size, the pay for publication online journal, I made fun of needing a test to know if you’re depressed [or better]. Maybe I looked back at it because I felt guilty about being so sort of nasty. I know I planned to pan that interview, which I thought was a sham, particularly the  plague-of-depression ending. So I read it through again, looked at the tables, and instead of softening, I went from sarcastic to bombastic.<\/p>\n

Your don’t need to hear another rant, so I thought I’d just stick to the sleight of hand that set me off. These two tables below are from the article with a few additions of my own – the red highlighting, and the columns and headers in shades of salmon: The upper table has the BASELINE data for control and MDD subjects and the lower one is both groups at 18 weeks:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I couldn’t figure out why there were two control groups, and why they were different. They were just an age\/sex\/race matched group used to assay the distribution of the various RNAs they looked at. So I did some Student T-Tests like they prescribed but got very different results. Then I reread the methods. They did paired T-Tests<\/a>!<\/font><\/strong> What that means is that every MDD case had a unique age\/sex\/race matched control subject:<\/div>\n