Blood tests can help detect suicide risk.

A group of American scientists announced on August 21st that they have discovered a series of biological indicators in the blood that could help determine a person's future risk of suicide.

The results of this study have now been published in the same issue of the journal Molecular Psychiatry (MPJ). According to researchers at Indiana University (USA), levels of biomarkers can significantly increase in the blood of both bipolar disorder patients who have suicidal intentions and those who have committed suicide.

Illustrative image. (Source: foodmatters.tv)

These results provided the first "basic evidence" that blood tests could help provide early warning of someone at high risk of impulsive suicide.

Over a three-year period, Niculescu and his colleagues monitored a group of patients diagnosed with bipolar disorder. They collected interviews and blood samples from these patients every 3-6 months.

The researchers then analyzed blood samples from a subset of participants, revealing a significant shift from having no suicidal thoughts to having strong suicidal ideation in the patients.

They identified differences in gene expression between "low" and "high" levels of suicidal ideation and found that markers called SAT1 and a range of other markers provided the strongest biological "signals" associated with suicidal ideation in patients.

Next, to verify the findings, they analyzed blood samples from suicide victims and found that several of the same leading markers were significantly elevated.

Finally, the research team analyzed the blood test results of two additional patient groups and found that high levels of blood biomarkers also correlated with the number of suicide-related hospitalizations in the future, as well as hospitalizations that occurred before and after the blood tests.

This suggests that these biomarkers not only reflect current high-risk status but are also markers associated with long-term suicide risk.

Psychiatrist Niculescu stated that more than one million people die by suicide worldwide each year, but argued that this is a preventable tragedy.

He argued that people who are about to commit suicide will not reveal it when asked, and then they die by suicide without us being able to do anything. Therefore, we need better ways to identify and intervene to prevent these tragedies.

The new research findings promise to be the key to detecting and preventing suicide risk in people, especially young people in the modern world.

According to (Vietnam+) - VT