Precision Medicine and its Applications for the Treatment of Mental Health
The term precision medicine describes the process of taking an individualized approach to health care treatment by analyzing a patient’s DNA, genetic makeup and the specific characteristics that are present in their illness. Precision medicine is a fairly new approach to patient treatment and hadn’t been utilized to the extent that it is today until after the beginning of the twenty-first century. Currently, one of the biggest advancements in the field lies in its application for cancer treatment. As opposed to solely using radiation, which affects both cancer cells and healthy cells, a sample of a patient’s tumor is analyzed and, thus, treatment is focused on damaging the specific cells that were found in, or on the surface of, the cancerous tumor. This treatment, which is often used along radiation or chemotherapy, often increases the effectiveness of the treatment and has the potential to lessen the chance of the recurrence of the patient’s cancer after they go into remission. Take the drug Gleevec for example, which targets a specific protein that is found in chronic myelogenous leukemia. Gleevec blocks the kinase protein, which is generated by a cancer causing mutation, and stops the rapid increase of white blood cells. The creation of this precision medicine treatment has altered chronic myelogenous leukemia patients’ prognosis drastically; patients once had a five year survival rate of less than thirty percent, but now have a five year survival rate of almost ninety percent.
Precision Medicine and targeted therapy has made extensive advancements within the scope of cancer treatment, and has a substantial amount of room for development as well. The personalized method of treatment has potential benefits that extend to other subfields within medicine, such as that of mental health treatment. Mental health treatment has had a past of being largely generalized depending on a patient’s condition, and consists of a system of trial and error. But what if there was a way to substantially cut down the amount of experimentation an individual has to undergo to find the right medication or method of treatment for them? Scientists are working towards creating treatment methods that are based on the genetic makeup of the patient and their disorder, similar to the way that precision medicine works within the realm of cancer treatment. The main barrier that prevents this idea from coming into fruition is the lack of comprehensive knowledge of the inner workings of the brain, which then increases the difficulty of determining the specific causes of pathology in the brain.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for mental illness and the International Classification of Diseases are the main two standardization texts that guide the diagnosis and treatment of mental health. While they have been highly beneficial in the process of recognizing different mental health illnesses, research has found that solely using this method of diagnosis ignores the biological causes of an illness. Thus, this can make two illnesses with similar symptoms but different biological causes to be categorized together and treated with alike treatment methods. The usage of biotype classification after completing the assessment of a patient’s symptoms helps to create a more precise classification of the illness, and thus be able to administer treatment that is more effective. The treatment of a mental illness would then be conducted through cognitive behavioral therapy, mindfulness therapy, and/or different medications, which would lessen a process that might take months until the patient finds a medication that is suitable for them. In addition to using biotypes as a stepping stone for treatments, other methods, such as data mining, are used to look for patterns within a population. This will aid in discovering biological or symptomological commonalities between individuals, leading to a more precise labelling and categorizing of different mental illnesses.
References:
Insel, Thomas. “The NIMH Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) Project: Precision Medicine for Psychiatry.” The American Journal of Psychiatry, American Psychiatric Association, 1 Apr. 2014, ajp.psychiatryonline.org/action/cookieAbsent.
Menke, Andreas. “Precision Pharmacotherapy: Psychiatry’s Future Direction in Preventing, Diagnosing, and Treating Mental Disorders.” PubMed Central (PMC), Pharmgenomics Pers Med, 30 July 2020, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6250105.
Stanford Medicine. “Precision Mental Health and Wellness.” Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford School of Medicine, med.stanford.edu/psychiatry/special-initiatives/pmhw.html. Accessed 14 July 2020.
“Targeted Therapy.” MD Anderson Cancer Center, University of Texas MD Cancer Center, www.mdanderson.org/treatment-options/targeted-therapy.html. Accessed 12 July 2020.
