Hippocampal Volume in Psychiatric Diagnoses: Should Psychiatry Biomarker Research Account for Comorbidities?

ABSTRACT:

Background

Many research papers claim that patients with specific psychiatric disorders (major depressive disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder, borderline personality disorder, alcohol use disorder, and others) have smaller hippocampi, but most of those reports compared patients to healthy controls. We hypothesized that if psychiatrically matched controls (psychiatric control, matched for demographics and psychiatric comorbidities) were used, much of the biomarker literature in psychiatric research would not replicate. We used hippocampus and amygdala volume only as examples, as these are very commonly replicated results in psychiatry biomarker research. We propose that psychiatry biomarker research could benefit from using psychiatric controls, as the use of healthy controls re

SUBMITTER: Gosnell SN 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7219869 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jan-Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature