A polygenic risk score (PRS) may be able to predict response to antipsychotic drug treatment in patients with their first episode of psychosis from schizophrenia, according to a study published Nov. 5 in the American Journal of Psychiatry. Specifically, higher PRSs were associated with poorer treatment response. “Polygenic risk scores represent the combined effects of many thousands of genetic variants across the entire genome, and better represent the very complex genetic nature of schizophrenia,” said Jian-Ping Zhang, M.D., Ph.D., the study’s lead author, in a statement. “These results suggest that polygenic burden may affect severity of illness, in addition to reflecting risk for developing psychosis.” Despite adoption of targeted treatment in other clinical areas, prescribing in psychiatry remains largely a trial-and-error endeavor, with an estimated 40 percent of patients with schizophrenia failing to respond to common antipsychotic drugs. In the present study, researchers chose patients with first-episode psychosis in order to minimize previous drug exposure and presumably increase the effect size of the genotype-phenotype association. Researchers used a discovery cohort of 77 patients from the Zucker Hillside Hospital First-Episode schizophrenia trial, as well as three validation cohorts —the European First Episode Schizophrenia Trial (EUFEST; n = 141), the Programa Asistencial […]