The Right Dose For Your Genes – A Test of a Lifetime
By Sheila Robinson, Staff Writer
The Lawton Constitution
Jennifer Flowers, a medication aide at McMahon Tomlinson Nursing & Rehabilitation Center, carefully sorts medications for patients.Pharmacogenetics is the study of variations of DNA and RNA characteristics as related to drug response. It can be difficult to predict who will benefit from a medication, who will not respond at all, and who will experience adverse effects.
Pharmacogenetics seeks to understand how differences in genes and their expression affect the body’s response to medications.
At McMahon Tomlinson Nursing & Rehabilitation Center, some 70 to 75 patients have undergone DNA testing with the assistance of their physician, the center and PGx Medical, according to J.R. Gutierrez, administrator of the center.
“We started, I think, in the summer of 2015,” Gutierrez said. “I had previous experience with it in the past at another facility. For example just in psychotropic medications, these are antidepressants or medicines for any residents that have depression or any kind of psychotropic conditions. Its great to be able to test them against 32 different medicines without giving them the medicine.”
Gutierrez said now they can also test for cardiac and pain medications.
“When we can take a resident, ultimately what we do is swab the inside of their mouth,” he said. “We just swab saliva from the inside of their mouth and that is what we send off to test. They test this against a battery of different medications. Then the results they give us tell us if there are any contraindications of medications patients are currently on for possible reactions. There are some medications that they don’t metabolize well.”
In other words, patients may not be getting the desired effect from medications they are taking. Although medical professionals in Lawton work with the PGx Medical office in Edmond, swabs are sent to PGx Medical’s processing laboratory in San Diego via Secure FedEx. Results are returned to the Lawton nursing center in about a week.
“We have been alerted to some drug interactions,” Gutierrez said. “Physicians have changed the medication that residents are getting. I think we have also seen, based on the results, that there’s other medications that would work better. The results will be flagged like a red, yellow, green. The red flag is there’s a potential drug interaction or they are not metabolizing it well. The yellow ones, they do OK on it; and the green one is they do well on it.”
Clay Bullard, president of PGx Medical, said their team works with physicians and care providers who are desiring to in- crease medical efficiencies, re- duce cost, increase better outcomes and ultimately do the best they can for each individual patient.
“PGx is very excited that several of the physicians within the Lawton area have embraced this definitive scientific tool to help guide them in the best and most appropriate medications to prescribe, based upon that patient’s unique metabolization profile,” Bullard said.
Gutierrez gave an analogy to help explain why the process has been used and how it created positive results.
“If you picture going to the doctor’s office for any condition, and the doctor says ‘Here, this normally works for this condition,” he said. “You take it and the doctor says we won’t know if it’s going to work for two or three weeks. Can you imagine doing that 32 times? As opposed to just swabbing right now and I’m testing it against 32 medications and within a week, I have the results.”
In Oklahoma, Medicare B, Medicaid and most health insurance companies cover the cost of the test, according to Kelly Burleson, director of marketing at PGx.
Residents at Tomlinson Nursing & Rehabilitation Center have had no out-of-pockets costs, Gutierrez said. The testing company has accepted what Medicare or insurance has paid them.
“I think the most important thing is with this metabolic testing, people don’t have to be guinea pigs at this point for probably 60 or 70 different medications,” Gutierrez said. “The doctors don’t have to be guessing as to which medication will work on people if they had this done already and had the test.”
Additional information about pharmacogenomics can be found online at www.pgxmed.com,
or contact PGx Medical at 405-509-5112 or info@pgxmed.com
Benefits of pharmacogenomics
Pharmacogenomics offers important benefits:
■ Improves patient safety. It is estimated that severe drug reactions cause more than 120,000 hospitalizations each year. Pharmacogenetic testing may help identify patients who are likely to experience dangerous reactions to drugs beforehand.
■ Improving healthcare costs and efficiency. The time and resources that doctors and patients spend finding appropriate medications and doses through “trial and error” is likely to fall as pharmacogenomic tests are developed. —www.Cancer.net