Loose ends of psychiatric research

摘要

Reading psychiatric research literature of the last several decades frequently gives the impression of fragmentation, where old research topics are abandoned for newer ones without proper follow-up that would place the existing data into a coherent structure. Such perspective is increasingly relevant though, as medical research draws more and more on methods that allow exploratory analyses of large amounts of data without having to specify a priori hypotheses. As in most medical research, methods of genome-wide association analyses, gene expression and proteomic profiling studies, and voxel-based morphometry and functional brain imaging studies have been prominent tools in psychiatry.