Investigation of Genetic Predictors of the Response to Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitors (SSRI) Treatment
Status:
Completed
Trial end date:
2008-01-01
Target enrollment:
Participant gender:
Summary
The antidepressant medications are among the most commonly prescribed pharmacological agents
in patients with mood and anxiety disorder. Despite recent advances in antidepressant
pharmacotherapy, there is a pressing need for substantial optimization and improvment of
outcome of pharmacotherapy of psychiatric disorders by providing individualized and
science-based treatment guidelines. Besides it is rather difficult in clinical practice to
predict, which patient will response to a certain pharmacological treatment well and which
one less so. Putative predictors of response to antidepressant include demographic and
clinical characteristics, personality traits, biological markers and psychophysiological
features. Recently the research studies shown that divergences in antidepressant efficacy may
be related to genetic variations of patients. The pharmacogenetic studies have multiplied in
recent decade due to the impact that such studies may have in everyday clinical practice once
reliable predictors could be identified. The pharmacogenetic research using new DNA
microarray-based technology can reasonably be expected to contribute to the prediction of
likelihood of treatment response and risk of development of adverse side effects in
individual patients in case of antidepressant treatment. By reducing costly treatment
failures and the likelihood of serious adverse events, pharmacogenetic testing may help to
improve the treatment possibilities for chronic diseases, reduce the burden prescription drug
costs, and lower the costs of drug development. The further detailed investigation of
peripheral gene expression profiles may help to identify responsible genes that underlie the
process of development of affective disorders and open novel horizons for understanding
molecular mechanisms of psychopharmacological treatment.