Blood test that picks best drug for depression
A NEW blood test could help doctors pick the best drug for patients diagnosed with depression for the first time.
Experts hope it will end the ‘trial and error’ approach to prescribing drugs and move towards personalised treatments for the mental illness.
One in 11 adults in Britain is thought to have taken antidepressants in the past year – with numbers on the rise.
Yet for half of patients the first drug they are given does not work, leading to a ‘merry-go-round’ as sufferers are shifted from one pill to the next until one is successful.
A third of people are resistant to all available drug treatments.
The new test, developed by experts at King’s College London, accurately predicts if patients will respond to common antidepressants.
They think it will be able to tell doctors in advance whether patients will need more aggressive treatment, which might involve a combination of drugs. The test measures two inflammation ‘biomarkers’ in the blood, shown in previous studies to be linked to a poor response to antidepressants.
Patients with levels of both above a certain threshold were 100 per cent certain not to respond to conventional common drugs. Those with markers below the threshold could be expected to respond to first-line antidepressants.
Study leader Professor Carmine Pariante, from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience at King’s, said: ‘This study provides a clinically suitable approach for personalising antidepressant therapy.’ The number of antidepressants prescribed has more than doubled in the last decade, from 29million in 2004 to 57million in 2014.
A study last year predicted that 9 per cent of British adults had recently taken them – the fourth highest out of 27 European nations, behind just Portugal, Lithuania and Malta.
Experts think that the high use may be due to patients being more willing to seek help as stigmas about mental illnesses fall away. But they also warn of a growing crisis in Britain’s mental health services, with many people having to wait months for counselling and given pills instead.
If the new test is proven to work in further trials, experts hope that it will at least reduce the number of people given ineffective pills.
Dr Annamaria Cattaneo, study co-author, said: ‘This study moves us a step closer to providing personalised antidepressant treatment at the earliest signs of depression. It is really crucial now to carry out a clinical study comparing the current clinical practice in antidepressant prescription, based on trial-and-error, with our novel approach of “personalised psychiatry”, where the treatment plan is guided by the blood test.’
Other experts last night welcomed the study, published in The International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology.
Marjorie Wallace, chief executive of mental health charity SANE, said: ‘Being able to target those people with depression who don’t respond to medication would be one of the most exciting steps forward in the treatment of mental illness for decades.’
Brian Dow, from the charity Rethink Mental Illness, said: ‘This new approach to antidepressants has the potential to be a real gamechanger and these findings are a promising start.
‘Changing from one kind of medication to the next can mean having to deal with different side effects every time, not to mention withdrawal symptoms from coming off one to go on another.’
‘Potential to be a real game-changer’