– Sir William Osler
Precision Psychiatry is a branch of Personalized Medicine which aims to improve psychiatric treatment by providing individualized recommendations based on the latest research.
Psychiatric patients are currently treated based on research conducted on groups. But individual patients show different response to different treatments. What works in one might not work in other in the same way or not at all. Many leaders in this field now believe that this is not the right approach towards treatment. There are multiple pieces of information that need to be considered while deciding the right medication.
A related discipline of medicine called Pharmaco-genetics tells us how having particular genes might make a medication more or less effective for us. Pharmacogenomic tests are increasingly becoming popular as they can tell whether a particular medication will be effective or whether you could have side effects.
Another unanswered question is that if one medication was effective in my family member will that be effective for me too. At present there is no clear answer to this question as there is limited research. But we hope that in the future more research will help us to tell with more confidence whether this is the case or not.
– Benjamin Bell
Another example might be Bipolar disorder where there are so many different clinical subtypes that it is virtually impossible to predict which medication will be most useful in the short or long term. At present the basic approach in in psychiatry is basically if trial and error and it takes a lot of time to reach the right combination if ever. There is a lot of ongoing research on Biomarkers in psychiatric disorders which will hopefully improve our treatment recommendations which is particularly help younger individuals who develop psychiatric illness.
QEEG research in last few decades has successfully shown that found that specific brainwave patterns respond to particular class of medications regardless of diagnostic label. This has been shown in conditions such as Depression, ADHD and OCD. This type of investigation is called Pharmaco-EEG. We at ZenWaves Clinic have embraced the principles of precision medication and are happy provide more information on this emerging area.
