Role of proteomics in biomarker discovery: prognosis and diagnosis of neuropsychiatric disorders.

One of the major concerns of modern society is to identify putative biomarkers that serve as a valuable early diagnostic tool to identify a subset of patients with increased risk to develop neuropsychiatric disorders. Today, proteomic approaches have opened new possibilities in diagnostics of devastating disorders like neuropsychiatric disorders. Proteomics-based technologies for biomarker discovery have been promising because alterations in protein expression and its protein abundance, structure, or function can be used as indicators of pathological abnormalities prior to development of clinical symptoms of neuropsychiatric disorders. This is because using mass spectrometry spectra analysis, it is possible to identify biomarkers of these diseases based on the identification of proteins in body fluids that is easily available, for example, the cerebrospinal fluid, serum, or blood. An ideal biomarker should be present in the blood before the disease is clinically confirmed, have high sensitivity and specificity, and be reproducible. Despite of advances in the proteomic technologies, it has not yielded significant clinical application in neuropsychiatry research. The review discusses overall proteomic approaches for elucidating molecular mechanisms and its applicability for biomarker discovery, diagnosis, and therapeutics of psychiatric disorders such as anxiety, depression, Alzheimer's disease, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder. In addition, we have also discussed issues and challenges regarding the implementation of proteomic approaches as a routine diagnostic tool in the clinical laboratory in context with neuropsychiatric disorders.