An Effective Method to Facilitate Personalized and Precise Medicine for Schizophrenia Treatment Based on...

Schizophrenia is a serious mental illness affecting 0.3-0.7% of the world's population. It is a classic quantitative genetic disease and is affected by a variety of common and rare genetic variants.

To facilitate personalized and precise medicine for schizophrenia treatment, we designed a program by genotyping a panel of related genes for schizophrenic patients using MassARRAY time-of-flight mass spectrometry. The program was tested in an observational clinical study conducted at the Hulunbuir Mental Health Center of China. In the study, a total of 254 patients diagnosed with schizophrenia were recruited and genotyped. The genotyping results were used to generate reports listing where the 16 included antipsychotics should be placed: "Use as directed," "Use with caution," or "Use with caution and with frequent blood concentration monitoring" categories. Seventy-two of the patients completed the 24-week follow-up observation, during which their PANSS scores were assessed at eight time points.

For all of the subjects who completed the study, the PANSS scores dropped significantly, showing the effectiveness of the treatment. During the 24-week study, PANSS scores of patients whose medications were consistent (N = 48) with their genetic test results dropped from 84.3 (SD = 12.4) to 58.8 (SD = 15.3), and average PANSS change rate reached 56.1% after 24 weeks. In contrast, PANSS scores of patients with genetic tests reported as "Use with caution" or "Use with caution and with frequent blood concentration monitoring" (N = 24) dropped from 81.1 (SD = 10.5) to 63.8 (SD = 10.1), and their average PANSS change rate was 37.6%.

This research indicates that our pharmacogenomic-based program could be a suitable and effective tool to facilitate precise medication in schizophrenia treatment.