Tansey, 2012 Genetic predictors of response to serotonergic and noradrenergic antidepressants in major depressive disorder...

[Altostrata]

No such genetic predictors exist, concludes the most authoritative study to date.

 

PLoS Med. 2012 Oct;9(10):e1001326. doi: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1001326. Epub 2012 Oct 16.

Genetic predictors of response to serotonergic and noradrenergic antidepressants in major depressive disorder: a genome-wide analysis of individual-level data and a meta-analysis.

Tansey KE, Guipponi M, Perroud N, Bondolfi G, Domenici E, Evans D, Hall SK, Hauser J, Henigsberg N, Hu X, Jerman B, Maier W, Mors O, O'Donovan M, Peters TJ, Placentino A, Rietschel M, Souery D, Aitchison KJ, Craig I, Farmer A, Wendland JR, Malafosse A, Holmans P, Lewis G, Lewis CM, Stensbøl TB, Kapur S, McGuffin P, Uher R.

 

Source

 

Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, London, United Kingdom.

 

Abstract and full text at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23091423

 

BACKGROUND:

 

It has been suggested that outcomes of antidepressant treatment for major depressive disorder could be significantly improved if treatment choice is informed by genetic data. This study aims to test the hypothesis that common genetic variants can predict response to antidepressants in a clinically meaningful way.

 

METHODS AND FINDINGS:

 

The NEWMEDS consortium, an academia-industry partnership, assembled a database of over 2,000 European-ancestry individuals with major depressive disorder, prospectively measured treatment outcomes with serotonin reuptake inhibiting or noradrenaline reuptake inhibiting antidepressants and available genetic samples from five studies (three randomized controlled trials, one part-randomized controlled trial, and one treatment cohort study). After quality control, a dataset of 1,790 individuals with high-quality genome-wide genotyping provided adequate power to test the hypotheses that antidepressant response or a clinically significant differential response to the two classes of antidepressants could be predicted from a single common genetic polymorphism. None of the more than half million genetic markers significantly predicted response to antidepressants overall, serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or noradrenaline reuptake inhibitors, or differential response to the two types of antidepressants (genome-wide significance p<5×10(-8)). No biological pathways were significantly overrepresented in the results. No significant associations (genome-wide significance p<5×10(-8)) were detected in a meta-analysis of NEWMEDS and another large sample (STAR*D), with 2,897 individuals in total. Polygenic scoring found no convergence among multiple associations in NEWMEDS and STAR*D.

 

CONCLUSIONS:

 

No single common genetic variant was associated with antidepressant response at a clinically relevant level in a European-ancestry cohort. Effects specific to particular antidepressant drugs could not be investigated in the current study. Please see later in the article for the Editors' Summary.

 

From the paper:

Editors' Summary

 

Background

 

Genetic and environmental factors can influence a person's response to medications. Taking advantage of the recent advancements in genetics, scientists are working to match specific gene variations with responses to particular medications. Knowing whether a patient is likely to respond to a drug or have serious side effects would allow doctors to select the best treatment up front. Right now, there are only a handful of examples where a patient's version of a particular gene predicts their response to a particular drug. Some scientists believe that there will be many more such matches between genetic variants and treatment responses. Others think that because the action of most drugs is influenced by many different genes, a variant in one of those genes is unlikely to have measurable effect in most cases.

 

Why Was This Study Done?

 

One of the areas where patients' responses to available drugs vary widely is severe depression (or major depressive disorder). Prescription of an antidepressant is often the first step in treating the disease. However, less than half of patients get well taking the first antidepressant prescribed. Those who don't respond to the first drug need to, together with their doctors, try multiple courses of treatment to find the right drug and the right dose for them. For some patients none of the existing drugs work well.

 

To see whether genetic information could help improve the choice of antidepressant, researchers from universities and the pharmaceutical industry joined forces in this large study. They examined two ways to use genetic information to improve the treatment of depression. First, they searched all genes for common genetic variants that could predict which patients would not respond to the two major groups of antidepressants (serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SRIs, and noradrenaline reuptake inhibitors, or NRIs). They hoped that this would help with the development of new drugs that could help these patients. Second, they looked for common genetic variants in all genes that could identify patients who responded to one of the two major groups of antidepressants. Such predictors would make it possible to know which drug to prescribe for which patient.

 

What Did the Researchers Do and Find?

 

The researchers selected 1,790 patients with severe depression who had participated in one of several research studies; 1,222 of the patients had been treated with an SRI, the remaining 568 with an NRI, and it was recorded how well the drugs worked for each patient. The researchers also had a detailed picture of the genetic make-up of each patient, with information for over half a million genetic variants. They then looked for an association between genetic variants and responses to drugs.

 

They found not a single genetic variant that could predict clearly whether a person would respond to antidepressants in general, to one of the two main groups (SRIs and NRIs), or much better to one than the other. They also didn't find any combination of variants in groups of genes that work together that could predict responses. Combining their data with those from another large study did not yield any robust predictors either.

 

What Do These Findings Mean?

 

This study was large enough that it should have been possible to find common genetic variants that by themselves could predict a clinically meaningful response to SRIs and/or NRIs, had such variants existed. The fact that the study failed to find such variants suggests that such variants do not exist. It is still possible, however, that variants that are less common could predict response, or that combinations of variants could. To find those, if they do exist, even larger studies will need to be done.