For the first time in John R. Brown’s two-decade quest for the right medication to make his brain behave, his psychiatrist offered him hope in the form of what seemed like rock-solid science.
By collecting the former editor’s DNA with a quick cheek swab, a new genetic test retailing at $3,800 would reveal which depression medications Brown would likely respond well to and those he would not.
The GeneSight test result helped prompt Brown’s psychiatrist to switch him to a new drug in June, making Brown optimistic that there might be a path back to a job, an apartment and even a new girlfriend. But three weeks later Brown, 40, was suicidal, checking into a mental hospital at his therapist’s urging.
“I can’t help but wonder if I should have stuck with the devil I know,” Brown now says.
Genetic tests to identify the most effective psychiatry drugs are the hot new technology in the race to create personalized treatments based on people’s DNA. More than 600,000 of these tests likely have been administered in the last three years, based on company websites and research data, to better treat conditions ranging from depression to attention deficit disorder to anxiety. In a nod to the tests’ growing acceptance, the federal Medicare program agreed last year for the first time to pay for the GeneSight test for some depressed patients.
But a review by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting has found that virtually all the evidence that these psychiatric tests work is based on limited studies funded by the companies themselves or researchers they fund, including all five studies used to promote GeneSight on the company’s website.