GeneSight Test: No Significant Results? Try a Different Research Measure

As I’ve discussed previously, drug-gene testing, also referred to as pharmacogenomics or pharmacogenetics, doesn’t really yet work for psychiatric drugs and disorders. People are buying a promise that’s not backed up by the research. Recently, one company in this space published a followup study to a large outpatient study of patients with clinical depression. Since the first study did not show any statistical significance in the study’s primary outcome measure, the company decided to simply re-crunch the data with another measure. Voila! Significance found. In early 2019, Myriad Genetics, makers of the GeneSight Psychotropic test, had the results of a study they funded published (Greden et al., 2019). This is referred to as the GUIDED study — Genomics Used to Improve DEpression Decisions. The primary measure used in that study — the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale-17 (HAM-D17) — showed no statistical significance between a group of patients using treatment guided by the drug-gene test to a group that had treatment as usual. This scale is commonly used in depression drug trials as a “gold standard” for measuring the effectiveness of depression treatment. The difference in symptom improvement scores between the two groups was 2.8%, with the “guided care” (the drug-gene testing) group experiencing slightly better symptom improvement. This difference, however, was not statistically significant. The study also fo...
Source: World of Psychology - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Brain and Behavior Depression Disorders Medications Treatment gene drug testing gene-drug genesight Source Type: blogs