Newsletter
The Long and Winding Road2024-03-12
“The long and winding road, That leads to your door, Will never disappear, I've seen that road before.”
—That leads to your door,
When we first launched the field of blood biomarkers for psychiatric disorders with our initial discovery almost 25 years ago, we hoped others would take the plunge and explore this area, as we continued to accumulate evidence in study after study over the years, moving to longitudinal and ever more comprehensive approaches, across various psychiatric disorders.
Finally, we are very happy to see that more groups are active in this space, even as they seem to display (academic) amnesia and claim that what they are doing is new and unprecedented. This can only benefit patients, the ultimate goal for all of us who are mission driven.
We would like to encourage the field to have as a gold standard reproducibility, not just p-value, and not publish things unless there is convergence and the findings are reproduced, and show predictive ability, in (multiple) independent cohorts. We have described in our studies over the years how a four step discovery, prioritization, validation and testing in independent cohorts approach works, and leads to findings that have stood the test of time. Precision psychiatry needs to be based on precision science!