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chazwomaq t1_iztb6ls wrote

No. No such scans or biomarkers exist. This is true for most psychological conditions, in fact. The broken bone analogy is not quite right, because we do scan the brain to look for lesions (damaged areas), or tumours, or swelling.

The physical basis of most psychological and psychiatric conditions is largely unknown, probably because it is on a much smaller, subtler, and more complex scale than broken bones or biochemical levels.

A brief read here: https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/29002457/4934408.pdf?sequence=1

Will we have physical diagnosis in the future? Perhaps, but it's worth noting that there is not bright line dividing autism or ADD from non-clinical symptoms. They are the extreme ends of a distribution of behaviour on which everybody lies somewhere. Again, this is true for many psychological conditions.

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cololz1 t1_izvz0we wrote

what about cerebral blood flow ?

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-019-0464-7

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chazwomaq t1_izw4vqt wrote

Oh that's interesting I didn't know about this study. However, on reading it, rCBF doesn't look precise enough for individual level diagnosis. To rely on that alone would probably yield loads of false positives and miss many true positives. And since people often know they have depression as its symptoms are subjective, a pencil and paper test seems much more efficient.

But perhaps in the future biomarker(s) will prove accurate for psychological conditions.

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