Psychiatric Pharmacogenomics: How to Integrate into Clinical Practice

Abstract

Pharmacogenomic testing can be integrated into modern mental health practices to help select psychotropic drugs for individuals who have failed first-line evidence-based treatments. This can be done by the process of “equipoise”—namely, balancing the weight of all available evidence. That evidence now includes not only diagnosis-specific treatment guidelines and “personalized” patient information, such as an individual’s specific symptom profile, past response to medications, side effects, family history, and patient preference, but also “precision medicine,” which incorporates the ever-expanding base of pharmacogenomic evidence for how an individual’s own biomarkers alter the odds for that individual’s treatment response or treatment intolerance.