America’s Mental Health Crisis: Can Science Help End the Medication Guessing Game?
Fast-Tracking Relief: How RxGenomix’s ExactMeds is Pioneering DNA-Guided Mental Health Treatment
FRANKLIN, TN / ACCESSWIRE / August 7, 2023 / Mental illness has reached crisis levels in the United States. According to a new CNN/Kaiser Family Foundation survey, 9 out of 10 American adults believe the country is experiencing a mental health emergency. This concern is well-founded. Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, mental health disorders were on the rise, now affecting more than 50% of people globally according to the World Health Organization. Here in America, over 20% of adults report experiencing mental illness each year.
Yet even as more Americans suffer, mental health care remains woefully inadequate. Patients face punishing wait times to see psychiatrists and therapists, many of whom don’t accept insurance coverage. But perhaps the biggest barrier is finding the right medications. The trial-and-error process of discovering effective drugs can take months or years, exacting a devastating emotional toll. Could innovations like pharmacogenetic testing help?
For patients and doctors alike, finding medications that actually work is a struggle. The most common psychiatric drugs – antidepressants, antipsychotics, and mood stabilizers – have shockingly poor success rates. Up to two-thirds of patients fail to respond to initial antidepressant prescriptions. But doctors have no predictive tools to identify ahead of time what drugs will be effective for a given individual.
Instead, finding the right match depends on months of experimentation. Patients are prescribed an antidepressant and told to wait 4-6 weeks to see if their symptoms improve. If one medication fails, they repeat the process again…and again. This drawn-out gauntlet means patients spend years suffering from crippling depression, anxiety, and other conditions without relief.
Brad Tice is a doctor of pharmacy who uses DNA testing to get people on the best medications for them and on as few medications as possible to treat their conditions. Tice is the founder and CEO of RxGenomix-creators of ExactMeds-as well as a former president of the American Pharmacists Association.
ExactMeds is focused on reducing such medication trial-and-error. Creator Tice says the flawed process of medical trial and error exemplifies the urgent need for personalized medicine in mental health care. Through DNA testing, tools now exist to understand how genetics shape each person’s drug response. Yet psychiatry has failed to embrace pharmacogenetic testing’s potential to get patients effective treatment faster.
The science behind pharmacogenetics is simple but powerful. Variations in key genes shape how medications are metabolized in each patient’s body. For instance, genes influence how quickly antidepressant drugs break down and whether they accumulate to therapeutic levels. With a simple cheek swab, doctors can now profile a patient’s genomic biomarkers to predict their expected response to different psychiatric medications.
This allows treatment to be personalized from day one. Instead of a months-long trial of medications likely to fail, pharmacogenetic testing provides guidance to immediately prescribe drugs aligned with the patient’s biology. Tice has seen how this removes the guesswork and frustration of the current trial-and-error paradigm. With DNA insights, patients get on optimal medications faster, saving precious time and mental anguish.
With mental health disorders surging, pharmacogenetics’ potential to transform treatment efficiency has never been more relevant. Major depression alone affects over 17 million Americans each year. Starting patients on medications genetically predicted to succeed could help millions recover faster. This promise has led some insurers to already cover pharmacogenetic testing. But overall adoption remains low due to a lack of awareness and psychiatric medicine’s general resistance to change.
Tice argues that making DNA-guided medication decisions the standard of care is critical to help patients navigate the mental health crisis. With suicidal ideation haunting millions, ensuring those struggling to receive effective treatment quickly must be an urgent priority. Pharmacogenetics delivers actionable biological insights to cut through months of medication guesswork. Patients in distress deserve the best modern medicine has to offer.
Yet realizing pharmacogenetics’ full potential will require much wider adoption by doctors, insurers, and health systems. Education on genetic testing’s benefits for both patients and providers remains limited. And psychiatric medication practices entrenched for decades are slow to evolve. But the mental health emergency demands bold new approaches. With leadership and awareness, innovations like pharmacogenetics could transform how we tackle this national crisis.
The suffering wrought by America’s mental health epidemic is immense, from rising suicide rates to untreated depression’s crippling toll. While resources remain scarce, leveraging new technologies like pharmacogenetics can help guarantee those seeking treatment find relief. Matching patients to medications aligned with their biology could become a key pillar of comprehensive mental health care. The future of millions struggling hangs in the balance. Now is the time to deploy innovations that work.
ABOUT:
RxGenomix combines medication-focused genetic testing and a clinical pharmacist’s expertise to make healthcare more personal and more clinically effective with lower total costs. RxGenomix is a pharmacist-led company seeking to personalize healthcare and help people have confidence and the best outcomes possible with their use of medications. To learn more, visit the RxGenomix website at rxgenomix.com. Additional information can be found on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.
CONTACT:
Brad Tice
btice@rxgenomix.com
(615) 814-2911
SOURCE: RxGenomix
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