Samuele Cortese, MD: Final Thoughts on Precision Medicine in ADHD

Precision medicine might have the most impact in psychiatry, particularly in treating patients with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

For many, antipsychotics and other medications used to treat psychiatric disorders, are ineffective. This will lead to an individual patient receiving different iterations of medicine before arriving at the correct option.

However, the time it takes to find the right treatment can be dangerous. The waiting period before finding the right treatment could cause a patient’s symptoms to get worse or cause them to forgo treatment altogether.

Precision medicine could be the answer, even if it is not precise enough to predict an individual response to a given pharmacological therapeutic.

Samuele Cortese, MD, PhD, Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, University of Southampton, explained how precision medicine could allow doctors to have a better chance of selecting the most effective option for ADHD patients.

Cortese was recently the author of a new study in the New England Journal of Medicine in which he examined the safety and efficacy of medications currently being used to treat ADHD.

In his review, Cortese found the overall prevalence of ADHD medication use was significantly lower than the estimated prevalence of ADHD between 2001-2015. Precision medicine could increase medication adherence for ADHD patients.