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The paper
A.B. Niculescu et al., “Towards precision medicine for pain: Diagnostic biomarkers and repurposed drugs,” Mol Psychiatr, 24:501–22, 2019.
Patients are often asked by their doctors to rate their pain, most commonly on a scale of 1 to 10. “Pain is a subjective experience,” says physician and professor of psychiatry Alexander Niculescu of Indiana University. “There’s no objective blood test out there.”
He and his colleagues are out to change that. Over the course of a year, the researchers tracked changes in gene expression in three cohorts of patients with major psychiatric disorders, one of which included only patients who had also been diagnosed with pain disorders. Comparing blood samples taken during visits when patients reported experiencing low or high pain, the team identified 60 genes whose RNA levels varied with pain severity. Expression levels of a subset of those genes, the researchers found, successfully ...
