Although available treatments for bipolar disorder (BD) are effective in reducing the risk of recurrence, over 90% of patients experience relapses and a significant minority have a poor outcome.Among patients who do respond, mild and subthreshold symptoms of the disorder are frequently observed and greatly affect their quality of life.Interindividual variability in drug response and side effects depends on a variety of non-genetic factors such as gender, ethnicity, age, smoking, diet, psychiatric diagnosis, disease status and concomitant medications, but also genetic ones. 1 As most antipsychotic medications undergo first-pass metabolism, cytochrome (CYP) 450 enzymes play a crucial role in drug response, influencing bioavailability, clearance and, for some antipsychotics like risperidone and clozapine, bioactivation. Furthermore, pharmacodynamic-related gene variants are hypothesized to affect both drug response and susceptibility to side effects. Overall, specific predictor biomarkers of treatment response are still lacking. 2 Despite the difficulty of clearly defining genetic variants that can guide clinicians towards a prediction of individual drug response, retrospective analysis of specific cases is considered useful in the development of a personalized approach to care.We report on the case of a patient with a long history of drug resistance and adverse reactions that led to poor compliance and severe chronicity. A retrospective analysis on the patient's pharmacogenetic profile revealed polymorphisms that could explain otherwise puzzling peculiarities of the patient's history.
| C A S E REP ORTEDP is a 48-year-old Caucasian, smoking female with good premorbid social and cognitive functioning and no reported familiar psychiatric history. The only child of a married couple, whose mother described a physiological perinatal period and early-life psychomotor development, EDP had a clinical onset at the age of 28, with a manic episode characterized by elevated mood, increased psychomotor activity, persecutory and grandiose delusions with abnormal behaviour and a significant lack of insight. Abuse of neither alcohol nor any other substance was reported. A diagnosis of BD was made according to DSM-IV criteria and a treatment regimen with a first-generation antipsychotic started. The patient soon complained of severe muscular postural rigidity and a switch to a second-generation antipsychotic and a mood stabilizer was initiated with a rapid emergence of similar adverse reactions. During her long clinical history, she was treated with most available antipsychotics, mood stabilizers and antidepressants, showing severe adverse reactions with almost all of them even at the lowest dose. This often limited the possibility of reaching effective doses and jeopardized her compliance.EDP presented with a severe disorder with continuous hospitalizations and a progressive deterioration of her psychosocial