What a Blood Test for Depression Means for Providers
Our diagnostic will bring unprecedented clarity in treating depression, with the ability to quantify your patient's condition, set a numerical therapeutic goal, and monitor your patient's journey toward that goal. While it can take patients an agonizing month or more to determine whether a treatment is working, the MoodMark® diagnostic will do this the first week, sparing patients weeks of uncertainty and unnecessary side effects.
A biological indication of severity of depression will help providers determine the appropriate level of intervention, particularly in justifying treatments that are especially time- and/or cost-intensive, and help patients to understand an objective basis for such decisions.
With our predictive test, our diagnostic will measure the effects of different compounds on the patient's blood sample, potentially avoiding years of failure with pharmaceutical approaches that could have been determined as ineffective before prescribing, and bringing the patient an effective treatment from there start. Providers will be better equipped to gauge the necessity of modifications to dosage, or addition of complementary treatment, at an early stage, rather than wait until the patient has already lost faith in the treatment plan.
Deployed by providers at scale, we will be able to screen populations of patients at high risk of untreated depression (like military and their families, students, people with disabilities, life-threatening diseases, severe physical pain, and people in under-treated communities), and bring millions of missed patients the help they need.
Together, we will reduce the prevalence of three problems in depression treatment.
Underdiagnosis:
There are clinically depressed individuals who could benefit from treatment but are missed by surveys, or by their healthcare providers' lack of time or information necessary to assess them. They may dismiss their own depression as something better left undiscussed, or something happening "all in their head" rather than, as we can show them, something happening even in their blood.
Overdiagnosis:
There are people who do not have the cellular activity of depression, but by picking 1-10 with certain symptoms on a survey are currently diagnosed and given medications that are unlikely to help, while the may endure side effects and difficult withdrawals. What they need may be the resolution of a stressful situation, or time from it, but their mood is regrettably brought into a medical context.
Misdiagnosis:
People who have bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, PTSD, substance use disorders, Lyme disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, hormonal or vitamin deficiencies, may be misdiagnosed with clinical depression, not only preventing them from receiving proper treatment, but even seeing that condition be worsened by the effects or side effects of a misprescribed anti-depressant treatment, such as weight gain that may exacerbate physical conditions, or in patients with other mental illnesses even the possible triggering of mania, psychosis, or increased suicidal ideation.