VA research will bring precision medicine to mental health

VA June 10, 2022
Clifford A. Smith, ABPP-Cn, is the director of Analytics, Innovations, and Collaborations in the VA Office of Mental Health and Suicide Prevention

If you’ve ever needed to change medication – maybe because of a side effect or because it just wasn’t working for you – you know that trial and error is often used to identify the best treatment, especially for mental health conditions.

That practice may soon be a thing of the past with recent advances in precision medicine, sometimes called “personalized medicine,” in which disease prevention and medical treatment are tailored to an individual’s clinical, lifestyle and genetic information.

While precision medicine has been used in physical health care for some time, precision medicine for mental health care is in its infancy.

Historically, medications have been prescribed for the “average” patient, a person of average age, weight, metabolism and other...

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