Brainscan BV, 7418 AH Deventer, The Netherlands.
Department of Psychiatry, University Medical Center Groningen, University of Groningen, 9713 GZ Groningen, The Netherlands.
Int J Mol Sci. 2020 Apr 25;21(9):3039. doi: 10.3390/ijms21093039.
The identification of biomarkers associated with major depressive disorder (MDD) holds great promise to develop an objective laboratory test. However, current biomarkers lack discriminative power due to the complex biological background, and not much is known about the influence of potential modifiers such as gender. We first performed a cross-sectional study on the discriminative power of biomarkers for MDD by investigating gender differences in biomarker levels. Out of 28 biomarkers, 21 biomarkers were significantly different between genders. Second, a novel statistical approach was applied to investigate the effect of gender on MDD disease classification using a panel of biomarkers. Eleven biomarkers were identified in men and eight in women, three of which were active in both genders. Gender stratification caused a (non-significant) increase of Area Under Curve (AUC) for men (AUC = 0.806) and women (AUC = 0.807) compared to non-stratification (AUC = 0.739). In conclusion, we have shown that there are differences in biomarker levels between men and women which may impact accurate disease classification of MDD when gender is not taken into account.
鉴定与重度抑郁症（MDD）相关的生物标志物有望开发出客观的实验室检测方法。然而，由于复杂的生物学背景，当前的生物标志物缺乏区分能力，并且对于性别等潜在修饰因子的影响了解甚少。我们首先通过研究生物标志物水平的性别差异，对 MDD 生物标志物的区分能力进行了横断面研究。在 28 种生物标志物中，有 21 种在性别上存在显著差异。其次，应用一种新的统计方法，使用一组生物标志物来研究性别对 MDD 疾病分类的影响。在男性中鉴定出 11 种生物标志物，在女性中鉴定出 8 种生物标志物，其中有 3 种在两性中均有活性。与不分层（AUC = 0.739）相比，性别分层导致男性（AUC = 0.806）和女性（AUC = 0.807）的曲线下面积（AUC）略有增加（无统计学意义）。总之，我们已经表明，男性和女性之间的生物标志物水平存在差异，如果不考虑性别因素，可能会影响 MDD 疾病的准确分类。
