Efficient prediction of vitamin B deficiencies via machine-learning using routine blood test results in patients with intense psychiatric episode

BackgroundVitamin B deficiency is common worldwide and may lead to psychiatric symptoms; however, vitamin B deficiency epidemiology in patients with intense psychiatric episode has rarely been examined. Moreover, vitamin deficiency testing is costly and time-consuming. It hampered to effectively rule out vitamin deficiency-induced intense psychiatric symptoms. In this study, we aimed to clarify the epidemiology of these deficiencies and efficiently predict them using machine-learning models from patient characteristics and routine blood test results that can be obtained within one hour. MethodsWe reviewed 497 consecutive patients deemed to be at imminent risk of seriously harming themselves or others over 2 years. Machine-learning models were trained to predict each deficiency from age, sex, and 29 routine blood test results. ResultsWe found that 112 (22.5%), 80 (16.1%), and 72 (14.5%) patients had vitamin B1, vitamin B12, and folate (vitamin B9) deficiency, respectively. Also, the machine-learning models well generalized to predict the deficiency in the future unseen data; areas under the receiver operating characteristic curves for the validation dataset (i.e. dataset not used for training the models) were 0.716, 0.599, and 0.796, respectively. The Gini importance of these vitamins provided further evidence of a relationship between these vitamins and the complete blood count, while also indicating a hitherto rarely considered, potential association between these vitamins and alkaline phosphatase (ALP) or thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH). DiscussionThis study demonstrates that machine-learning can efficiently predict some vitamin deficiencies in patients with active psychiatric symptoms, based on the largest cohort to date with intense psychiatric episode. The prediction method may expedite risk stratification and clinical decision-making regarding whether replacement therapy should be prescribed. Further research includes validating its external generalizability in other clinical situations and clarify whether interventions based on this method can improve patient care and cost-effectiveness.