48 results about "Metabolic change" patented technology

The present invention provides a method of screening a mammal for the onset or predisposition to the onset of a neuropsychiatric disorder. More particularly, the present invention provides a method of screening a mammal for the onset or predisposition to the onset of schizophrenia by screening for a decrease in the functional level of protein 14-3-3ζ. In a related aspect, the present invention also provides a means of monitoring a patient diagnosed with a neuropsychiatric disorder, such as schizophrenia, by screening for changes to functional levels of protein 14-3-3ζ. This may be useful, for example, in the context of evaluating the effectiveness of a prophylactic or therapeutic treatment regime or otherwise monitoring the impact of physiological or metabolic changes which may occur in a patient. The method of the present invention is useful in a wide range of applications including, inter alia, providing a means of identifying mammals susceptible to the onset of a neuropsychiatric condition, such as a condition characterized by one or more symptoms of schizophrenia, thereby enabling the implementation of prophylactic or early therapeutic intervention in an effort to either minimize or prevent the onset of the condition. It also provides a means of confirming diagnoses which would otherwise be based solely on an assessment of positive and negative symptoms.

Disclosed is a method of extracting all metabolites existing in a biological sample to detect a comprehensive difference between metabolites of a control group and a test group, thereby verifying significance thereof. More particularly, the invention comprises a first step of analyzing a fraction extracted with a solid phase extraction method, a fraction obtained by extracting the remnant fraction with a liquid-liquid extraction method and fractions extracted with the liquid-liquid extraction method at two pH different from each other after the hydrolysis, with a gas chromatography-mass spectrometry; a second step of converting the chromatogram result into numerical values capable of being statistically processed; and a third step of analyzing the numerical values with a principal component analysis (PCA) and a discriminant analysis (DA) to detect a difference between the control group and the test group. According to the invention, the difference between the two groups can be comprehensively detected with the areas of the peaks on the chromatogram, without a standard material or verified quantitative method. Therefore, it is possible to detect the metabolic change in the organism due to the disease or gene mutation, without an accurate quantitative analysis of the metabolites.