Grant: Project Grant

Depression is very common and has serious effects on adolescents and their families. While ~ 150,000 Canadian adolescents take antidepressant medications each year, many do not feel better after taking this medication. Some adolescents can react badly to the medication-this is called a side effect or adverse reaction-and some adolescents may need to be admitted to hospital. This situation is due, in part, to a common 'trial-and-error' approach to prescribing medication, where adolescents take a medication for up to a month to see if it will work, and if it does not work, they might try a different one after that. During the months (or sometimes years) it can take to find a medication that works, adolescents and their caregivers can feel hopeless, and their mental healthcare may cost more than needed. Our team aims to address the trial-and-error approach to prescribing medications. We want to evaluate a new way to match adolescents to an antidepressant medication that is most likely to be safe and beneficial for them. We will enrol adolescents into a study that uses a small amount of their saliva to conduct a single genetic test. The results from this test show whether: 1) their genes might make it harder for their body to process some antidepressant medications (causing unexpected side effects or adverse reactions), or 2) their genes may cause their body to process an antidepressant medication too fast, which means they may not benefit from that medication or may need a higher dose to benefit. We want doctors to use these genetic test results when they make a decision about which medication to prescribe. We will test whether this new approach improves symptoms of depression as well as quality of life, day-to-day functioning, and healthcare costs better than the current trial-and-error approach.