• Question: you mentioned blood molecules that will be able to predict who will go on to develop a mental illness, how does this work and is it dependent on the individuals conditions? im really interested in mental health, and know many that struggle with it, so is this something that will hopefully be around in the near future?

    Asked by Owen to Livia on 7 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Livia Carvalho

      Livia Carvalho answered on 7 Nov 2017:

      yes, we take everything into account. We create models where we add information related to health (age, gender, body fat, poverty), and also clinical information such as whether they had depression previously, whether they have previously taken medication, how many etc and we also add the blood molecules i mentioned. We then do some maths to see which models best predict who would develop particular illnesses.

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