Potential clinical utility of plasma amino acid profiling in the detection of major depressive disorder.

Plasma amino acids levels were measured in first-onset treatment-naïve depressed patients (n=26) and healthy controls (n=25) using a mass spectrometry-based method. One of the major findings was that a logistic regression model constructed from tryptophan, glutamine and cysteine discriminated depressed subjects from controls with a receiver-operating-characteristic curve integral of 0.90. Crown