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posted by martyb on Tuesday August 16 2016, @02:44PM   Printer-friendly
from the wishing-them-success dept.

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956 from a VAI press release:

A collaborative study from research teams in Sweden, the US and Australia published in Translational Psychiatry shows that suicidal patients have a reduced activity of an enzyme that regulates inflammation and its byproducts.

It is known that people who have attempted suicide have ongoing inflammation in their blood and spinal fluid. Now, a collaborative study from research teams in Sweden, the US and Australia published in Translational Psychiatry shows that suicidal patients have a reduced activity of an enzyme that regulates inflammation and its byproducts.

[...] Currently, there are no biomarkers for psychiatric illness, namely biological factors that can be measured and provide information about the patient's psychiatric health. If a simple blood test can identify individuals at risk of taking their lives, that would be a huge step forward, said [Professor Sophie] Erhardt, a Professor at the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology at the Karolinska Institutet, who led the work along with [Professor Lena] Brundin.

The researchers analyzed certain metabolites, byproducts formed during infection and inflammation, in the blood and cerebrospinal fluid [CSF] from patients who tried to take their own lives. Previously it has been shown that such patients have ongoing inflammation in the blood and cerebrospinal fluid. This new work has succeeded in showing that patients who have attempted suicide have reduced activity of an enzyme called ACMSD, which regulates inflammation and its byproducts.

[Continues...]

[...] The substance that the enzyme ACMSD produces, picolinic acid, is greatly reduced in both plasma and in the spinal fluid of suicidal patients. Another product, called quinolinic acid, is increased. Quinolinic acid is inflammatory and binds to and activates glutamate receptors in the brain. Normally, ACMSD produces picolinic acid at the expense of quinolinic acid, thus maintaining an important balance.

[...] Several of the researchers have indicated that they have business interests, which are recognized in the article.

Having found these results in suicidal patients, the researchers are now trying to find out if this imbalance is also present in those with severe depression. They are also seeking to develop drugs that might activate the ACMSD enzyme and restore the balance between quinolinic and picolinic acids.

The full article is available: "An enzyme in the kynurenine pathway That governs vulnerability to suicidal behavior by regulating excitotoxicity and neuroinflammation" Translational Psychiatry, published online August 2, 2016, doi: 10.1038 / TP.2016.133.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 17 2016, @12:06AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 17 2016, @12:06AM (#388905)

    Right, so many of them special snowflakes vs people so genuinely desperate they go off themselves. FUCK YOU and your thin-skinned fucktards. "INSIGHTFUL" my ass.

  • (Score: 2) by meustrus on Wednesday August 17 2016, @03:27PM

    by meustrus (4961) on Wednesday August 17 2016, @03:27PM (#389148)

    My argument also applies to suicide bombers and IS. They prey on young people's disaffection and promise them a new way to value their own life: according to a very simple, very achievable perversion of their parents' religion. And it's been a problem to some extent for every single generation of 20-somethings in America for at least the last 60 years. You can get on a high horse and call it some kind of generational failing that obviously didn't affect you in your youth, but it is a real problem that only gets worse the larger the world population gets. Because the root cause is that society already works and doesn't need any one person in the next generation to do any particular job, and most people aren't ambitious enough to carve out their own niche.

    --
    If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?