One of the enduring problems with treating schizophrenia is that, when it gets right down to it, clinicians don't know where or why the disease originates. There aren't any blood tests you can take to rule out the illness, which means people with vague psychiatric symptoms can be misdiagnosed and suffer without treatment for years. (Or, conversely, they can be diagnosed with schizophrenia when they don't actually have it, and treated with hardcore medicines they don't actually need.)

But that's not the Funday good news. The good news is that some researchers are now saying that they may be able to determine if a person has the disease using spinal fluid as an indicator. From Medical News Today:

In their search for biomarkers, Bahn and colleagues examined the levels of different molecules present in the cerebrospinal fluid of 82 patients with schizophrenia and 70 healthy controls. Of the patients, 54 had just been diagnosed with schizophrenia (or a similar illness called brief psychotic disorder) and had not yet taken any schizophrenia-specific drugs. The remaining patients were undergoing treatment with a range of antipsychotic drugs. The researchers found different levels of certain molecules in the spinal fluid of newly diagnosed patients who had never taken schizophrenia drugs compared with healthy individuals of the same ages. These molecules might therefore turn out to be useful biomarkers for schizophrenia.

Veddy interesting.

Metabolic Profiling of CSF: Evidence That Early Intervention May Impact on Disease Progression and Outcome in Schizophrenia