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 ill-defined. 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 wide-spectrum 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.