Dr. Wendie Trubow explains how to catch depression early by watching for small changes like skipping cooking, and why vitamin B12 deficiency and high homocysteine levels predict it. Annual lab screening could catch it before it gets severe.
How can we find people before they're in the place where they're too depressed to cook for themselves? Are there signs that people can point to to go, okay, I need to go in and see my provider? What are the things that people should be on the look for?
Well, I think going back to the family history, even though Patient A is no evidence of depression when you're seeing them, say they're 30-year-old, that family history would just kind of put a little star and would want to routinely look at some of these risk factors. And again, some of the blood tests, like B12— homocysteine is one of the most significant predictors of depression down the road. So if there's that family history, it might be— just like we're going to monitor a lipid panel once a year, or whatever you guys do as PCPs, As a psychiatrist, if there are risk factors, I'd want, you know, a yearly checkup of these known kind of risks for depression.
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