Editors: Adomas Bunevicius and Arimantas Tamasauskas, Neuroscience Institute and Department of Neurosurgery, Lithuanian University of Health Sciences, Kaunas, Lithuania

Anticipated publication in BMDJ vol. 1, no. 4

Brain disorders remain a significant cause of morbidity, mortality and handicap worldwide. Rapid and accurate identification of individuals at risk and reliable outcome stratification of patients diagnosed with brain disorders are critical for improvement of patient outcomes as well as for optimized use of available healthcare and research funding sources. Towards this end, numerous biomarkers have been established and are being continuously developed in order to improve identification of individuals at risk and to more accurately predict patient outcomes. However, application of biomarkers in routine clinical settings still remains limited mainly because of insufficient evidence that they can improve prognostic value of currently available clinical prognostic models.

Integration and linking of currently available research datasets can be an important step allowing to: (1) generate novel research hypotheses for biomarker development; (2) more reliably investigate clinical utility of biomarkers in larger patient samples; (3) study interaction between biomarkers and commonly available clinical variables for patient outcome prediction; and (4) develop novel prognostic models integrating established clinical prediction models with biomarkers.  

The BMDJ Editorial Board announces this call for data papers and datasets on biomarkers of brain disorders and will cover datasets obtained on:

• Patients diagnosed with brain disorders
• Individuals at risk for brain disorders
• Experimental in vivo and in vitro studies.

Of particular interest are original works on:

• Novel genetic, epigenetic, transcriptomic, proteomic and metabolomic biomarkers
• Application of computational modelling methods for biomarker discovery
• The value of biomarkers for individual risk stratification
• Clinical applicability of biomarkers
• Integration of biomarkers with clinical data to improve clinical decision making.

Interested contributors are invited to submit their datasets and manuscripts, prepared according to BMDJ Submission Guidance (where you can download the BMDJ template for a Data Paper). For further details, please visit the BMDJ website.

Once accepted and prepared in its final camera ready version, your paper will be openly accessible in the ‘Preview’ section of the website, thus providing for a quick impact and recognition of the authors.

Anticipated publication of the full issue: October 2015