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Neuroscience Provides New Psychiatric Biomarkers
Biology reveals three kinds of ADHD — just not the types we thought.
I hear it all the time. “If psychiatry were a real science, you’d have biomarkers for your conditions — but you don’t.”
It hasn’t been for lack of trying. For over half a century, researchers have been studying neurotransmitter levels, measures of brain activity, and gene variants to find a biological marker that is strongly and consistently connected to any psychiatric condition. Yet all attempts so far have come up short.
This doesn’t mean that psychiatric conditions don’t have a basis in biology.
For a number of conditions we can demonstrate that those with the condition differ, on average, with respect to a biologic variable compared to those without the condition. Certain dopamine transporters and receptors are present in lower numbers in reward and motivation pathways for those with ADHD. People who have panic disorder have more active amygdalas and smaller hippocampi than those without panic attacks. Although these group differences are robust and replicated, the ranges of test results for those with and without the condition overlap so much that a given measurement fails to identify who has or doesn’t have the condition.
