Clinical evaluation of efficacy and safety of and #945;-keto analogs of essential amino acids supplementation in patients of chronic kidney disease

Abstract

INTRODUCTION Biological psychiatry aims to understand mental disorders in terms of the biological function of the nervous system. By several measures it has been a tremendous success--thousands of scientific papers [...] Patients with mental disorders show many biological abnormalities which distinguish them from normal volunteers; however, few of these have led to tests with clinical utility. Several reasons contribute to this delay: lack of a biological 'gold standard' definition of psychiatric illnesses; a profusion of statistically significant, but minimally differentiating, biological findings; 'approximate replications' of these findings in a way that neither confirms nor refutes them; and a focus on comparing prototypical patients to healthy controls which generates differentiations with limited clinical applicability. Overcoming these hurdles will require a new approach. Rather than seek biomedical tests that can 'diagnose' DSM-defined disorders, the field should focus on identifying biologically homogenous subtypes that cut across phenotypic diagnosis--thereby sidestepping the issue of a gold standard. To ensure clinical relevance and applicability, the field needs to focus on clinically meaningful differences between relevant clinical populations, rather than hypothesis-rejection versus normal controls. Validating these new biomarker-defined subtypes will require longitudinal studies with standardized measures which can be shared and compared across studies--thereby overcoming the problem of significance chasing and approximate replications. Such biological tests, and the subtypes they define, will provide a natural basis for a 'stratified psychiatry' that will improve clinical outcomes across conventional diagnostic boundaries. Molecular Psychiatry (2012) 17, 1174-1179; doi: 10.1038/mp.2012.105; published online 7 August 2012 Keywords: clinical tests; diagnosis; stratified medicine; stratified psychiatry