Psychiatric Pharmacogenomics

The field of psychiatric genomics has developed dramatically over the past 10 years. The essential goal of psychiatric pharmacogenomics is to measure genetic variation in individual patients to predict their response to psychotropic medications. The initial application of pharmacogenetic testing has been to identify patients who have structural and functional changes in their drug-metabolizing enzyme genes that are associated with increased serum levels of medication at standard doses. More recently, genetic variance in the serotonin transporter gene and the serotonin 2A receptor gene has been used to predict the response of patients to selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.