Use of the Clinical Laboratory

Publisher Summary Adjunct use of the clinical laboratory is as necessary to clinical psychiatry as it is to other fields of medicine. Determining differential diagnoses, and predicting and monitoring treatment response can be assisted with appropriate use of the laboratory. This chapter discusses laboratory diagnosis of physical illness presenting as a psychiatric disorder. Some primarily physical disorders such as infections, endocrine disorders, and nutritional disorders need to be distinguished from functional psychiatric disorders and require specific medical treatment. While tests to screen for all of them are not routinely prescribed for every patient with psychiatric symptoms, obtaining a good history of concurrent physical symptoms or environmental exposures will suggest further medical and diagnostic laboratory evaluations. The chapter provides an overview of the detection of drug abuse or overdose and laboratory assessment of psychopharmacologic treatment through various methods. While much of biological psychiatric evaluation and treatment remains an area for future research, important strides toward more empirical and scientific decision making have been made in the past several decades that depend, in part, on proper utilization of the clinical laboratory.