Investigation of Genetic Predictors of the Response to Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitors (SSRI) Treatment

The antidepressant medications are among the most commonly prescribed pharmacological agents in patients with mood and anxiety disorder. Despite recent advances in antidepressant pharmacotherapy, there is a pressing need for substantial optimization and improvment of outcome of pharmacotherapy of psychiatric disorders by providing individualized and science-based treatment guidelines. Besides it is rather difficult in clinical practice to predict, which patient will response to a certain pharmacological treatment well and which one less so. Putative predictors of response to antidepressant include demographic and clinical characteristics, personality traits, biological markers and psychophysiological features. Recently the research studies shown that divergences in antidepressant efficacy may be related to genetic variations of patients. The pharmacogenetic studies have multiplied in recent decade due to the impact that such studies may have in everyday clinical practice once reliable predictors could be identified. The pharmacogenetic research using new DNA microarray-based technology can reasonably be expected to contribute to the prediction of likelihood of treatment response and risk of development of adverse side effects in individual patients in case of antidepressant treatment. By reducing costly treatment failures and the likelihood of serious adverse events, pharmacogenetic testing may help to improve the treatment possibilities for chronic diseases, reduce the burden prescription drug costs, and lower the costs of drug development. The further detailed investigation of peripheral gene expression profiles may help to identify responsible genes that underlie the process of development of affective disorders and open novel horizons for understanding molecular mechanisms of psychopharmacological treatment.