by brant bullard | Apr 6, 2014 | Metabolic Validation Program
Are you doing everything you can to provide the best healthcare and personalized care for your residents?
In a recent article on Senior Housing Forum, the author states, “From my perspective this is a win-win opportunity for every senior community, every resident and every physician. Better healthcare for your residents, reduced drug costs and a unique marketing tool for your communities.”
So let me ask you, if you could offer your residents personalized medicine that would improve their quality of life, would you do it?
Pharmacogenetics isn’t new but it is just now gaining the attention of healthcare professionals – especially in senior communities where the majority of residents are on multiple medications.
What makes this work in senior communities is that medicare and many senior HMO’s realize that this tool will save them money so they will cover the “once in a lifetime” test. The PGx Metabolic Validation Program has demonstrated that 25%-40% of residents would benefit from the test and be treated with a different medication based on Metabolic Validation.
The PGx Metabolic Validation Program is simple. On the physicians orders, a quick swab is taken of the inside of the resident’t mouth. Once the swab is analyzed and a report is generated, the physician can treat that resident on a personal basis. The report allows physicians to know which classes of drugs will be most effective, and the data can also provide guidance on dosage.
This test is no different than any other lab work and is kept in the residents file to help improve their quality of life and decrease the “trial & error” process. Which makes it very accepting for families and a unique marketing tool for homes. Better care and personalized attention.
For more information, or to schedule an implementation meeting, contact:
PGx Medical
Individualized Care – Personalized Medicine
info@pgxmed.com
405-509-5112
www.pgxmed.com
by brant bullard | Mar 23, 2014 | News
In December 2008, the New York Times ran a story about a woman from California who had been taking a drug called tamoxifen to help prevent breast cancer. After two years of taking the drug, her doctor ordered a new genetic test that showed that her genes were preventing the drug from working properly.
“You find out you’ve been taking this medication for all this time, and find out you are not getting benefit…I was devastated” says the women. She had to stop taking tamoxifen. The good news is that she found out that the drug was not helping her and her doctor can now prescribe a drug which will work in her body. The bad news is that she could have known this two years ago if she had taken the genetic test from Day 1.
Experts report that approximately $300 billion is wasted each year on drugs which apparently do not work in people who have certain genes. These people never receive the full benefit from these drugs. Others are getting dangerous side effects.
For example, the blood-thinning drug warfarin is one of the top twenty drugs prescribed in the US. It is used to help prevent blood clots. If a person’s genes prevent the drug from working correctly, warfarin becomes dangerous. It is one of the top three drugs that cause hospitalization or emergency room visits. If a person has genes that allow too much warfarin to get into the bloodstream, the blood cannot clot correctly and the person can have bleeding. On the other hand, if a person has genes that prevent enough warfarin from getting into the bloodstream, the person could develop serious blood clots. The way a person’s body reacts to warfarin, tamoxifen and other drugs depends on differences in their genetic makeup.
Genes provide your body with instructions for making enzymes. Enzymes are needed for your body to break down drugs so your body can get benefit from the medicine. You carry two copies of every gene: one from your mother and one from your father. Differences in these genes can affect the speed of different enzymes you have in your body. This affects how well your body is able to use medicines and how well drugs work in your body. Differences in your enzymes can affect how your body can metabolize (break down) a drug and how long the drug stays your body. Based on what type of genes you carry, you may be:
- a poor drug metabolizer
If you are a “poor metabolizer”, you do not break down drugs well. This may result in too much drug in the body which may lead to a dangerous side effect or even death. In some cases, your body may not be able to break down certain drugs to their working form and therefore the drugs will not work properly.
- an extensive or “normal” drug metbolizer
You metabolize drugs at the normal rate.
- an ultra-rapid drug metabolizer
If you are an “ultra-rapid” metabolizer, this means you break down drugs too fast, causing them to be of no use in the body. If medications do not work properly, conditions such as high blood pressure, blood disorders, and cancer will be left untreated and may even lead to death.
Genetic Tests for Drug Response
Researchers have now found more than 30 types of drug metabolizing enzymes in humans and mostly all of them vary between people.
The three main genetic tests available today include: CYP2D6, CYP2C9, and CYP2C1.
Read entire article at: Consumer Health
For more information on Genetic Drug Testing
(PGx Metabolic Validation Program) contact:
PGx Medical
Individualized Care – Personalized Medicine
info@pgxmed.com
405-509-5112
by brant bullard | Mar 16, 2014 | Journal articles
Pharmacogenetic (PGx) testing is a type of genetic test that assesses a patient’s risk of an adverse response or likelihood to respond to a given drug, informing drug selection and dosing.
As a pillar of the personalized medicine movement, PGx testing is anticipated to be important across all medical specialties,2 but particularly in primary care, where the majority of all drug prescriptions are written. It has been estimated that many of the drugs commonly prescribed by primary care practitioners (PCPs) such as fluoxetine, metoprolol, warfarin, and simvastatin are affected by PGx variation. Although several different strategies of delivering PGx testing have been proposed or are being investigated,6–8 at present, there is little clarity on which health professionals should order PGx testing, at what stage during treatment testing should be ordered, how best to communicate results to patients, and where results should be stored to inform future therapeutic decision making. Patients prefer receiving PGx test results from a familiar provider whom they trust such as a PCP; however, several factors have contributed to the slow integration of PGx testing in the primary care setting, including limited time as well as familiarity and experience with PGx testing. Because PGx testing is a relatively new field and many PCPs are unfamiliar with many of the basic tenets of the field, ongoing learning opportunities and/or faculty development would enable PCPs to feel more comfortable with the topic, and presumably engage in more effective communication with patients, and more appropriate use of testing. This paper suggests key elements to be discussed with patients prior to testing and when reporting test results to assist PCPs while recognizing some of the practical limitations in the primary care setting.
Read entire article here
For more information on Pharmacogenetic Testing, contact:
PGx Medical
Empowerment at the Source of Treatment
Individualized Care – Personalized Medicine
www.pgxmed.com
info@pgxmed.com
405-509-5112
by brant bullard | Feb 17, 2014 | News
What is pharmacogenomics?
Pharmacogenomics uses information about a person’s genetic makeup, or genome, to choose the drugs and drug doses that are likely to work best for that particular person. This new field combines the science of how drugs work, called pharmacology, with the science of the human genome, called genomics.
What might pharmacogenomics mean for you?
Until recently, drugs have been developed with the idea that each drug works pretty much the same in everybody. But genomic research has changed that “one size fits all” approach and opened the door to more personalized approaches to using and developing drugs.
Depending on your genetic makeup, some drugs may work more or less effectively for you than they do in other people. Likewise, some drugs may produce more or fewer side effects in you than in someone else. In the near future, doctors will be able to routinely use information about your genetic makeup to choose those drugs and drug doses that offer the greatest chance of helping you.
Pharmacogenomics may also help to save you time and money. By using information about your genetic makeup, doctors soon may be able to avoid the trial-and-error approach of giving you various drugs that are not likely to work for you until they find the right one. Using pharmacogenomics, the “best-fit” drug to help you can be chosen from the beginning.
How is pharmacogenomic information being used today?
Doctors are starting to use pharmacogenomic information to prescribe drugs, but such tests are routine for only a few health problems. However, given the field’s rapid growth, pharmacogenomics is soon expected to lead to better ways of using drugs to manage heart disease, cancer, asthma, depression and many other common diseases.
One current use of pharmacogenomics involves people infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Before prescribing the antiviral drug abacavir (Ziagen), doctors now routinely test HIV-infected patients for a genetic variant that makes them more likely to have a bad reaction to the drug.
Another example is the breast cancer drug trastuzumab (Herceptin). This therapy works only for women whose tumors have a particular genetic profile that leads to overproduction of a protein called HER2.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) also recommends genetic testing before giving the chemotherapy drug mercaptopurine (Purinethol) to patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Some people have a genetic variant that interferes with their ability to process the drug. This processing problem can cause severe side effects and increase risk of infection, unless the standard dose is adjusted according to the patient’s genetic makeup.
The FDA also advises doctors to test colon cancer patients for certain genetic variants before administering irinotecan (Camptosar), which is part of a combination chemotherapy regimen. The reasoning is that patients with one particular variant may not be able to clear the drug from their bodies as quickly as others, resulting in severe diarrhea and increased infection risk. Such patients may need to receive lower doses of the drug. Read more at genome.gov
Where Can I Find More Information About Pharmacogenomics?
PGx Medical
Empowerment at the Source of Treatment
Individualized Care – Personalized Medicine
www.pgxmed.com
405-509-5112
For feedback or to schedule a phone conference, email:
info@pgxmed.com
