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Adding Drug-Drug Interactions, Lifestyle Factors Boosts Pharmacogenomics Guidance
Incorporating drug-drug interactions and lifestyle factors into pharmacogenomics-guided medication management contributed to improved remission rates in patients with major depressive disorder, according to a poster presentation at Psych Congress.
The study looked at the role of drug-drug interactions and lifestyle factors in previously published outcomes associated with the use of IDgenetix, a pharmacogenomics test that combines drug-gene results with drug-drug interactions and lifestyle factors for medication recommendations.
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“In a randomized controlled trial, IDgenetix-guided drug recommendations were shown to significantly improve remission rates compared to the standard empirical approach (Bradley et al. 2018),” wrote Feng Cao, PhD, of Castle Biosciences, San Diego, California, in the poster abstract.
Among guided drug recommendations for 261 patients with moderate to severe depression, drug-drug interactions made up nearly a third, according to the poster abstract. Lifestyle factors constituted 11%.
Remission rates at 12 weeks were 41% for patients in the pharmacogenomics-guided group compared with 27% for patients in the group not guided by pharmacogenomics, according to the findings. In a subset of 106 patients who at baseline were taking antidepressants incongruent with their IDgenetix results, 12-week remission rates were 47% for the pharmacogenomics-guided group compared with 22% for the unguided group.
“The addition of drug-drug interactions and lifestyle factors to drug-gene interactions significantly impacted the number of drug recommendations within this study and contributed to improved remission rates for patients with moderate to severe depression,” the study concluded.
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