Clinical validation of eye movement abnormalities as diagnostic biomarkers of psychiatric disorders

Biomarkers have the potential to revolutionize the diagnosis and management of psychiatric disorders which comprise some of the worst illnesses to afflict mankind. The commercial potential is enormous. No objective tests are currently used in routine clinical practice. The present symptom based diagnoses are unreliable and inaccurate, and often lead to suboptimal, inappropriate or even dangerous treatments. Customer satisfaction is poor. We have discovered that a battery of tests based on simple eye movement recordings show remarkable sensitivity and specificity across a range of major psychiatric disorders.8 Their performance characteristics are superior to current symptom based clinical diagnosis, and we are unaware of any serology, radiology or gene based biomarkers for psychiatry that approach this level of accuracy. We plan to validate our findings by replicating them in new cohorts of patients with the disorders we have already examined and to further test specificity in individuals with borderline personality and obsessive compulsive disorders. The validation and development of simple objective tests to help in diagnosis, risk evaluation and treatment of individuals with major psychiatric disorders will improve patient healthcare and wellbeing, satisfy an enormous unmet need and reduce costs in NHS UK and worldwide.