Table I. Abnormal involuntary movements assessed by the Abnormal Involuntary Movements Scale (AIMS) in patients with chronic schizophrenia, grouped according to magnesium superoxide dismutase (MnSOD) and dopamine D3, receptor (DRD3) genotype combinations. MnSOD-alalDRD3-ser. … Prospects for pharmacogenetic testing in the clinic The aim of pharmacogenetic research is to develop clinically useful tests that will allow potential responders to a particular psychotropic agent to be identified prospectively, as well as those individuals likely to develop

adverse effects. This is not an easy task Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical in the case of psychotropic drugs. Some of the reasons for this difficulty are applicable to drugs used to treat other complex disorders; others are specific to psychotropic agents. Several have been discussed in this paper. The polygenic basis of pharmacogenetic traits is an issue of major importance. For most traits it, is unclear how many genes arc involved, and genes that have been implicated Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical thus far in well-studied phenotypes such as TD are of small effect. The OR observed rarely exceed 2.0, and for the most part, are less than 1.5. It requires large samples to explore

such small gene effects in the definitive fashion required for their inclusion in a pharmacogenetic test. Large samples Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical are also needed in order to tease apart, gene-gene and gene-environment interactions. Recruitment, of large samples inevitably increases the likelihood of stratification, Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical which can lead to spurious results and must be taken into account. A further consideration is that, background and demographic variables must be considered (as pointed out in this paper for the role of age in the manifestation of certain gene effects in TD) as well as treatment-related variables such as medication dose, duration of treatment, and age at onset of treatment. Furthermore, treatment outcome is frequently related to severity of illness, and this must, also

be taken into consideration. Thus, it, is clear that a model used to predict treatment Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical outcome or susceptibility to adverse effects will be unavoidably complex, given the number of background and potential predicting variables that will need to be taken into account including gene-gene and gene-environment interactions. Adenylyl cyclase Based on our selleck products previous work on the genetics of TD, we have developed a preliminary model that takes into account the various, background, clinical and genetic factors that, we have studied (Scgman et al, unpublished data). We employed logistic regression and entered background and clinical variables known to influence susceptibility to TD such as age, sex, cigarette-smoking, age at first, antipsychotic treatment, duration of antipsychotic treatment, antipsychotic dose in chlorpromazine units, and total score on the Positive And Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS).