The dexamethasone suppression test (DST) assesses the functionality of the HPA axis and can be regarded as the first potential biomarker in psychiatry. In 1981, a group of researchers at the University of Michigan published a groundbreaking paper regarding its use for diagnosing melancholic depression, reporting a diagnostic sensitivity of 67% and a specificity of 95%. While this study generated much enthusiasm and high expectations in the field of biological psychiatry, subsequent studies produced equivocal results, leading to the test being rejected by the American Psychiatric Association. The scientific reasons leading to the rise and fall of the DST are assessed in this review, suggestions are provided as to how the original test can be improved, and its potential applications in clinical psychiatry are discussed. An improved, standardized, and validated version of the DST would be a biologically meaningful and useful biomarker in psychiatry, providing a tool for clinicians caring for depressed patients in the areas of diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis, and predicting the risk of suicide. Additionally, such a test could be a crucial part in the generation of biologically homogenous patient cohorts, necessary for the successful development of new psychotropic medications.

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Background: Both borderline personality disorder (BPD) and schizoaffective disorder (SAD), as well as their potential connection, remain controversial diagnoses. To explore whether BPD may be part of the spectrum of SAD, we conducted a longitudinal study of a large clinical cohort of patients with BPD. Methods: We assessed the diagnostic trajectories of 402 patients with BPD in a 20-year retrospective study based on electronic clinical records from a psychiatric hospital using ICD-9 diagnoses. Data were descriptively examined on concurrent and sequential diagnoses in patients with BPD. For the classification of SAD, a proxy diagnosis was used. Results: The study population showed a high prevalence of affective disorders and a high frequency of concurrent diagnoses of affective–BPD. Together, stable BPD, stable affective disorder sequences and transitions from affective disorders to BPD represented 79% of all longitudinal trajectories. Conclusion: These findings should be considered exploratory and do not allow confirmation or refutation of the hypothesis that BPD serves as a precursor, prodrome, or component within the spectrum of SAD.

Systematic photon scattering experiments have been performed over the recent years at the Giessen Electron Linac and Stuttgart Dynamitron in order to investigate low lying dipole transitions in deformed nuclei. With the high resolution and sensitivity of these Nuclear Resonance Fluorescence (NRF) experiments detailed dipole strength distributions in numerous isotopes could be extracted. By using linearly polarized bremsstrahlung or by measuring the linear polarization of the scattered photons the parities of numerous J=1 states in 48Ti, 70,72Ge, the rare earth nuclei 142,150Nd, 162Dy and in 232Th could be determined in an unambiguous, model‐independent way.