Advancing the Treatment of Depression With Personalized Medicine

Personalized medicine holds the hope of increasing the likelihood that patients with depression will respond to treatment and achieve remission. Currently, insufficient evidence is available supporting personalizing variables. However, ongoing large individualized comparative effectiveness studies may provide detailed information in the future. Some of the features that have potential as personalizing variables that can help predict response to particular treatments, pending replication studies, include sex, hormonal status, atypical depression, childhood trauma, family history of mental illness, and certain biomarkers and genetic polymorphisms.