Gene Risk Scores May Predict Antipsychotic Response in Patients With First-Episode Psychosis

Astudy published today inAJP in Advance suggests that calculating the polygenic risk score (PRS) of a patient with first-episode psychosis can offer clues as to whether he or she will respond to antipsychotics. A PRS involves adding up the total number of genetic variants associated with schizophrenia risk in an individual ’s DNA.“Polygenic risk scores represent the combined effects of many thousands of genetic variants across the entire genome, and better represent the very complex genetic nature of schizophrenia,” said lead study author Jian-Ping Zhang, M.D., Ph.D., an assistant professor at the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research, in apress release.Zhang and colleagues first analyzed DNA samples from 510 patients with first-episode psychosis who were participating in one of four clinical trials testing antipsychotic medications (two trials in the United States and two in Europe). The researchers identified how many genetic variants associated with the risk of developing schizophrenia each participant had. The total number of variants was used to calculate a polygenic risk score. They next compared the patients ’ PRS score with how well they responded to the assigned antipsychotic (which in these four studies included amisulpride, aripiprazole, haloperidol, olanzapine, quetiapine, risperidone, and ziprasidone). The patients were considered to have responded to treatment if they experienced a reduction of 50% or more in total symptom scores from baseline to the ...
Source: Psychiatr News - Category: Psychiatry Tags: antipsychotic biomarker first-episode psychosis genetic risk genetic variant polygenic risk score precision medicine schizophrenia Source Type: research