Personalized Medicine: The Way Forward?

This article will look at some of the strategies already available to help healthcare professionals meet individual patient needs, in the multifaceted field of personalized medicine. Personalizing drug therapy for depression Research suggests that around 50 percent of patients with depression do not respond to first-line antidepressants. What can explain this, and how can it be solved? Current treatment is often a case of trial and error. A patient may take one medication after another, often for 12 weeks or more each time, while symptoms remain the same, or worsen. A team from King's College London in the United Kingdom recently announced a blood test that can predict with accuracy and reliability whether an individual patient will respond to common antidepressants. This, they say, "could herald a new era of personalized treatment for patients with depression." High levels of blood inflammation have been linked to a lower response to antidepressants, so the team designed a test to distinguish levels of blood inflammation. It evaluates the levels of two biomarkers: macrophage migration inhibitory factor (MIF) and interleukin (IL)-1β. Results showed that none of the patients with levels of MIF and IL-1β above a certain threshold responded to conventional antidepressants, while with inflammation levels below this threshold did tend to respond. The findings indicate that patients with higher levels of inflammation should use a combination of antidepressants from the ea...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news