New test could revolutionise suicide prevention

New standard could revolutionise suicide prevention

A inartificial measurement of the sweat gland action of a depressed person can fix if he or she is suicidal - with 97 per cent accuracy. Now a different large clinical study confirms the correlation.

Blood constraining force, blood circulation and activity in the cutaneous excretion glands of the fingers can tell if a person is suicidal.

"The results are in such a manner strong that I'm astonished", says Lars-Hkan Thorell, join professor in experimental psychiatry at Linkping University, any of the researchers behind the study. "We have power to determine very accurately whether a human frame risks committing suicide, which can revolutionise self-murderer prevention."

In the German-Swedish study, published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, 783 depressed in-patients in Germany were tested for hyporeactivity - reduced ability to repeat to various stimuli. A suicidal depressed part reacts differently to environmental changes, compared to a in good case person. The result confirms previous exploration stating that there is a binding correlation between hyporeactivity and suicide in depressed populace.

The test found that hyporeactivity was not away in up to 97 per cent of depressed patients who later committed self-slaughter, compared to just 2 per cent of the depressed patients who were not hyporeactive.

But the study too shows there is no relation between the severity of depression and hyporeactivity. Associate Professor Thorell: "It indicates a fixed per cent, even if the according to rule population can have this neurophysical distemper. Everyone who has it is not suicidal - if it be not that almost all suicidal, depressed patients own it."

Hyporeactivity was most prevalent in the bipolar patients: of 126 patients, 80.2% were canting, compared to 67.3% of the depressed patients and 58.5% of those by other diagnoses. The study also shows that the public with recurrent depression run a dare to undertake of becoming hyporeactive at some later witticism in life.

"It was probably the form that certain nerve cells in the hippocampus are damaged the agency of depressions and negative stress."

Hyporeactivity can be measured by the test bodily substance listening to a pattern of tones, season the body's reactions are limited via sensors on the fingers. The elementary time they hear a tone, substantially all people react. This is a ill-defined orientation reaction which occurs automatically. But whereas the tone is heard again, the reaction decreases amongst some people: the hyporeactive.

"A depressed part has a biological inability to care almost the surroundings, while a healthy human frame continues to react."

Associate Professor Thorell decision now engage the spin-off concourse Emotra to conduct a study in more 15 countries together with his co-authors, including Professor Manfred Wolfersdorf, professor of psychiatry and mentor of the Bayreuth city clinic, and Professor Wolfgang Kaschka, University Hospital Ulm.