Opinion and Debate: Improving schizophrenia diagnosis through biomarkers: an upcoming prospect

Despite extensive research and deliberation, the diagnoses of schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders remain enigmatically difficult and the established diagnostic criteria, even after several critical reviews, are continually illdefined. Indeed, the widely used ICD-10 guidelines are in fact derived from the observations reported by Schneider in the early part of the last century. Recent advances in a widespectrum of technologies have enabled investigators to utilize robust, highly sensitive and specific biomarkers for accurate diagnoses, for example, troponin levels for the diagnosis of an acute myocardial infarction. With the absence of any biochemical tests, psychiatric disorders and schizophrenia in particular, are one of the few groups of illnesses that are clinically evaluated in their entirety. Current diagnosis of schizophrenia relies on subjective tests which often result in varying interpretations by different clinicians for the same patient. This is further compounded by the fact that the margins used to categorize psychiatric illnesses clinically can be blurry. For example, hallucinations can be a part of bipolar disorder, schizophrenia as well as psychotic depression. This overlap in symptomatology has made it challenging to classify and distinguish these diseases.