Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders: A Case Study

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Recommended: Mcq on pharmacogenomics

A revolution is taking place in the world of medical treatments. Personalized medicine, as the name implies, is the new up-and-coming way to predict the efficacy of treatment plans for a variety of illnesses. The key to personalized medicine lies within the human genome, in the field of pharmacogenomics. This burgeoning discipline could pave the way for groundbreaking new treatments of a variety of disorders, from cancer to mental illnesses.

Psychotropic medications in particular are of great interest in this advancing field. Since the advent of psychopharmacology, physicians noticed something about psychiatric drugs that further complicated the treatment of mental illness: many patients react very differently to psychiatric drugs. One patient may greatly benefit from a medication that has no effect on another patient. Some patients may experience extreme side effects, …show more content…

The child written about in this paper struggled with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and Tourette’s syndrome. A combination of the antidepressant fluoxetine and the ADHD medicines methylphenidate and clonidine were prescribed to treat the child’s symptoms. Over the course of the next 10 months, the boy presented with symptoms commonly associated with metabolic toxicity, including stomach issues, low fever, disorientation. Symptoms became so severe that the child lapsed into continuous seizures and suffered cardiac arrest, resulting in the child’s death. Due to the tragic and unexpected circumstances, an autopsy was conducted. The results showed extremely high levels of fluoxetine within the child’s body, and a genetic test found that the boy had a defect in the CYP2D6 gene that rendered him a poor metaboliser of the

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