Biological Markers in Psychiatry and Its Relation with Translational Approaches: Brief Historical Review

Abstract

In recent years, psychiatry has attempted to find biological markers of mental illness in the strict sense or psychiatric disorders with a corporal or biological base. The purpose of this chapter is to schematically describe from the beginning the set of efforts made by biological psychiatry with the goal to find markers for mental illness, explaining the pathogenesis of these illnesses, and possibly providing new therapeutic approaches. This chapter attempts to synthetically and schematically review only a few lines of investigation in current psychiatry. It begins with a discussion about the first biochemical peripheral amines dosed, as primarily tracers or trace amines, which generated the first experiences in Argentina in the late 1960s by Fischer and colleagues. It continues with the development of the concept of “windows” in neuroendocrine function tests and its relevance. They were used primarily in the 1980s and we display this topic mentioning our studies on the extra hypothalamic action of hypophysotropic peptides, and the relationship of conventional transmitters with these releasing factors. Finally, we include our initial studies from the 1990s, referring to perceptual disturbances in schizophrenia, starting this new phase of exploration. It was cognitive or neuropsychological at first, with translational approaches to human psychoses. Finally, we describe electrophysiological exploration, including more sophisticated methods. We review briefly a field that currently has virtually unlimited proportions, hardly reducible to a single line of thought. This is a brief story of a group that had the opportunity to attend, since its inception, as a spectator of a revolution, and at times participating in direct human research approaches, and in some cases, in translational research.