Can a genetic test help patients get on the right antidepressant?

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Here we go again!
Psychiatrists call it the “trial and error factor”: when they set out to prescribe an antidepressant, they have no clinically proven way of knowing which one to choose. Any given antidepressant tends to help only about a third of patients; the other two-thirds end up doing the prescription shuffle, trying one drug, then another, then a third or fourth in hopes of finally hitting on a treatment that works.



In theory, pharmacogenetics—the subfield of personalized medicine that focuses on how people with different DNA variants respond to drugs—is supposed to solve this problem. The idea is to allow doctors to tailor their prescribing to their patients’ genes. But so far, despite all the research that has been done in the decade since the first draft of the Human Genome Project was released, the genetics of mental illness are still a maddeningly complex mystery.



What, then, to make of GeneSightRx, a new test that identifies variants in five genes and tells doctors which antidepressant to pick based on its results?
 
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