Genomic Insights: Guiding Antidepressant Selection with Precision

According to a new study, genetic tests using polygenic risk scores can help guide antidepressant selection for patients with depression and anxiety, offering a practical way to reduce prolonged trial-and-error by summarizing thousands of small genetic effects into a single, clinically interpretable metric linked to drug-response patterns.

Today, clinicians choose antidepressants based on symptom profile, comorbidity, prior response and isolated pharmacogenetic markers such as CYP450 variants. Polygenic scores change that frame by aggregating thousands of loci into a continuous predictive measure, converting distributed genetic signals into actionable probability gradients for response rather than a single-gene heuristic.

Those probability gradients correlate with likelihood of response and nonresponse to specific drug classes, enabling stratification into higher- and lower-likelihood responder groups.

In practice, polygenic risk scores may flag patients at higher risk of early treatment failure and identify subgroups more likely to benefit from particular antidepressant or anxiolytic classes — information that can be integrated with clinical factors when weighing options.