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>The test examines biomarkers that can help them objectively determine someone's risk for developing anxiety, the severity of their current anxiety and which th

• loldk 4y ago
  [dead]
• derbOac 4y ago
  I do research in this area and I sort of bristle whenever an article talks about "objective measures" of some psychological phenomenon, as if the subjective experience isn't really what it's about. So the framing of this article really rubbed me the wrong way. Having said that, I thought this was still interesting just in terms of the biochemistry and molecular biology of systems involved in anxiety. I think the most practical utility of this might be in drug treatment planning although that tends to not work out in the real world as well as it does in theory and research. Another angle on this kinda mentioned in various places is that people come into the clinic claiming extreme anxiety when they just want drugs to resell or abuse. But even that could get tricky because lots of times people abusing drugs also feel anxiety. One elephant in the room with this paper is they didn't really measure anything else. So it has some predictive utility in "anxiety versus not" in a select group of people, but what if other mood state issues are also moving around with it? It's kind of like saying "hey our model predicts cats in images" in some database where you've removed all the dogs and foxes and otters and so forth and so on. Or maybe it's like having a database where all the images with cats also have a 80% chance of having a dog, fox, etc.?