LRFN5 and OLFM4 as novel potential biomarkers for major depressive disorder: a pilot study

Abstract

Evidences have shown that both LRFN5 and OLFM4 can regulate neural development and synaptic function. Recent genome-wide association studies on major depressive disorder (MDD) have implicated LRFN5 and OLFM4, but their expressions and roles in MDD are still completely unclear. Here, we examined serum concentrations of LRFN5 and OLFM4 in 99 drug-naive MDD patients, 90 drug-treatment MDD patients, and 81 healthy controls (HCs) using ELISA methods. The results showed that both LRFN5 and OLFM4 levels were considerably higher in MDD patients compared to HCs, and were significantly lower in drug-treatment MDD patients than in drug-naive MDD patients. However, there were no significant differences between MDD patients who received a single antidepressant and a combination of antidepressants. Pearson correlation analysis showed that they were associated with the clinical data, including Hamilton Depression Scale score, age, duration of illness, fasting blood glucose, serum lipids, and hepatic, renal, or thyroid function. Moreover, these two molecules both yielded fairly excellent diagnostic performance in diagnosing MDD. In addition, a combination of LRFN5 and OLFM4 demonstrated a better diagnostic effectiveness, with an area under curve of 0.974 in the training set and 0.975 in the testing set. Taken together, our data suggest that LRFN5 and OLFM4 may be implicated in the pathophysiology of MDD and the combination of LRFN5 and OLFM4 may offer a diagnostic biomarker panel for MDD.

Elevated SCN11A concentrations associated with lower serum lipid levels in patients with major depressive disorder

“…Furthermore, considering that antidepressant drugs were commonly used in clinical practice, both DN-MDD and DT-MDD were assigned to the training and testing sets. As our previous studies conducted [ 32 , 61 ], these two sets were used to evaluate the diagnostic generalizability of SCN11A. Here, we found that the SCN11A-based discriminative model had excellent diagnostic performance in diagnosing MDD patients in both the training set and testing set, which indicated that SCN11A might be a potential biomarker for diagnosing MDD.…”

“…According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-version IV criteria and the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems criteria, 11 th revision, the diagnosis of MDD was validated by two qualified psychiatrists. The 17-item Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HDRS) was used to assess the severity of depression in MDD patients [ 32 , 33 ]. All MDD patients enrolled from the First Affiliated Hospital of Chongqing Medical University’s Department of Psychiatry.…”

“…Each participant’s peripheral whole-blood samples were taken by venous puncture. According to our earlier works [ 14 , 32 , 36 , 37 ], serum was extracted by centrifuging it at room temperature for 15 minutes at a speed of 3000 g, then aliquoted, and stored at –80 °C until use. Two blind researchers used commercially available high-sensitivity ELISA kits from MEIMIAN (Jiangsu, China) to measure the total amount of SCN11A.…”