One of the difficulties doctors face when prescribing antidepressants is that they're unpredictable.
One person might do well on a certain drug, but the next person might get no benefit from the exact same pills. Finding the right drug for each patient is often a matter of trying different ones until one works.
So a genetic test to work out whether a certain drug will help a particular person would be really useful. Not to mention really profitable for whoever patented it. Three recent papers, published in three major journals, all claim to have found genes that predict antidepressant response. Great! The problem is, they were different genes.
First up, American team Binder et al looked at about 200 variants in 10 genes involved in the corticosteroid stress response pathway. They found one, in a gene called CRHBP, that was significantly associated with poor response to the popular SSRI antidepressant ...
