每周阅读 第八周
文章链接：摘选自《经济学人》Major depression is a serious illness, but also an elusive one. It wrecks lives and may drive people to suicide. It sometimes, though not always, alternates with periods of mania in a condition called bipolar disorder. And it is disturbingly common. Reliable figures are hard to come by, but in some parts of the world as many as one person in four experiences major depression at some point during their life. Depression’s diagnosis has, though, a worryingly arbitrary quality to it, depending as it does on a doctor’s assessment of a patient’s mood against a checklist of symptoms which may be present in different combinations and are often, in any case, subjective. This has led to a search for reliable biochemical markers of the illness. Not only might these assist diagnosis, they may also improve assessments of prognosis and point towards the most effective treatment in a particular case. Now, a group of neuroscientists at Indiana University, in Indianapolis, led by Alexander Niculescu, think they have found a set of markers that can do all this. As they write in Molecular Psychiatry, Dr Niculescu and his colleagues have been working with data and blood samples collected over the course of 15 years from hundreds of patients at the Indianapolis Veterans Administration Medical Centre. The targets of their investigation were small pieces of RNA, a molecule similar to DNA which is copied from the DNA of genes as part of the process by which the information encoded in those genes is used by cells to make proteins.
Tracking levels in the blood of relevant RNA molecules shows the activity of the underlying genes. That let the researchers identify, in an initial sample of 44 patients’ records, which genes were becoming more and less active as people’s mood disorders waxed and waned. To start with, they found thousands of possible candidate genes in this way, but they first narrowed these down to those that seemed to show the best prediction of mood and then, by turning to the corpus of published research on genes associated with depression, narrowed the selection still further to 26 that had previously been suspected of involvement in the illness. They then followed this clutch up in eight groups of patients, ranging in size from 97 to 226, to see which best predicted the course and details of a patient’s illness.
elusive adj. 难懂的；易忘的；逃避的；难捉摸的
wreck n. 破坏；失事；残骸；失去健康的人vt. 破坏；使失事；拆毁vi. 失事；营救失事船只
mania n. 狂热；狂躁；热衷
arbitrary adj. 任意的；武断的；专制的
prognosis n. 预后；预知
molecule n. [化学] 分子；微小颗粒，微粒
clutch v. 紧握；（因害怕或痛苦）突然抓住；突然感到恐惧n. 离合器（踏板）；一群；控制；紧握；一窝蛋；女式无带手提包adj. 紧要关头的
underlying adj. 潜在的；根本的；在下面的；优先的v. 放在…的下面；为…的基础；优先于
中文大意：抑郁症是一种严重的疾病，也是一种难以诊断的病，严重时可能使人自杀危及生命。但令人不安的是，抑郁症太普遍了，而且可靠的数据很难获取。在世界上的一些地区，有25%的在人生某个阶段有过患严重抑郁症的经历。
然而对抑郁症诊断的随意性却总让人惴惴不安，因为这种诊断取决于医生对病人情绪的评估，而且病人的症状可能会以不同的形式体现。这一现状促使人们开始寻找能证实这种疾病的可靠数据。因为这些数据不仅能助于诊断，还能改善预后评估并且能为特殊病例指明最有效的治疗方法。如今，在印第安纳波利斯的印第安纳大学，由亚历山大尼库列斯库领导的神经学家团队认为他们已经在人体中发现了一组这样的生理标记。
他们在《分子精神病学》中写道，尼库列斯库博士和他的同事一直在研究15年来收集的数据和血液样本，这些数据和样本取自来印第安纳波利斯退伍军人管理局医疗中心的数百名患者。是一段类似于DNA的分子，随着细胞利用DNA基因中的编码信息来制造蛋白质的过程，这些分子可以被从中复制出来。通过追踪血液中相关RNA分子的含量可以显示出潜在基因的活性，这使研究人员可以在44名抑郁症患者的初始记录样本中识别出其中联系——即随着病人情绪障碍的加重或减弱，可以识别出哪些基因变得更活跃或更安分。
研究人员在八组病人身上进行追踪调查看哪些最能预测抑郁症的病情和细节。
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