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Seems a solid attempt to make prescribing anti-depressants into more of a science. So that's a good thing, as right now I feel like doctors are just throwing pills at people and hoping it works out. As that article points out, most first time anti-depressant prescriptions fail to really help. So the patient has to go about pharma treatment on a trial and error basis, which could take several months to a few years, if it's even ever successful to any meaningful degree whatsoever.
The downside to adding this to a doctor's arsenal is just like the article points out:
Does the story adequately explain/quantify the harms of the intervention?
Not Satisfactory
Although harms from a cheek swab are unlikely there is a potential harm in framing the genetic testing results as guiding the choice of one antidepressant over another. Patients may focus solely on pharmaceutical options, to the exclusion of non-pharmaceutical ones.
Antidepressants have well-documented side effects and drug interactions.
That's an important point. Even if this does help a doctor narrow down which pharmaceutical to prescribe, it assumes an anti-depressant is the answer, and that it's just a matter of picking the right one based on the person's genetic markers.
Perhaps if this tech is coupled with doctors being taught, in depth, about genetic markers and how that info can be interpreted into a holistic treatment plan for a person, this could really help.
But that's a stretch, both to educate everyone involved AND to assume doctors and these companies don't just want to use this to validate the practice of what I believe most understand: to overprescribe anti-depressants in the first place.