Genetic Testing
Genetic Testing
The more your doctor knows about your body, the greater the likelihood they can prescribe the perfect medication for your condition. At Ohio Psychiatry Services in Lancaster and Hilliard, Ohio our providers and their team use genetic testing, to help determine which medications are right for you and which might pose a serious threat to your health.
What is Genetic Testing?
Genetic testing identifies changes in your genes or chromosomes that can help confirm or rule out certain medical conditions. Pharmacogenetics uses genetic testing to determine the probability that a drug will help or even hurt you. In the medical community, experts refer to this as “personalized” or “precision” medicine.
Physicians use pharmacogenomics to customize health care decisions and treat each person directly.
Why is Genetic Testing used in Psychiatry?
While many areas of medicine are turning to pharmacogenetics for help in determining the best medications for every patient, it is especially popular in three major medical fields: cancer, cardiovascular health, and psychiatry.
Many patients (30% to 50%) do not respond well to their first round of antidepressants, while only about 37.5% achieve full remission, according to Psychiatry Advisor. It may often take months of trial and error to find the right treatment for depression.
During this waiting period, patients can suffer serious side effects from an antidepressant that is not working for them — including nausea, fatigue, insomnia, and loss of sexual desire — in addition to the debilitating effects of depression.
Millions of people experience unwanted side effects from their medications every year. Pharmacogenomics can help the Ohio Psychiatric Services team determine if a drug will work for you — or if it could cause severe side effects — before they even prescribe it.
Your genes also affect how safe and effective a particular drug could be for you. Genes are often the reason the same medicine at the same dose affects people in vastly different ways. Genes may also be the reason some people have bad side effects to the medicine, while others have none.
To learn more about your genetic health, call Ohio Psychiatric Services at 740 201 6021, or book an appointment online now.
