Pharmacogenetics
terrasig | October 18, 2009The always-outstanding neuroblogger, SciCurious, put up an excellent post overnight on a presentation she saw at the current Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) in Chicago. Therein, she wrote about a poster presentation she saw on the relationship between iron, cholesterol, and Alzheimer's disease.
All was quite well until near the end of her post. That is where my writer's block of the last week dissipated and manifest itself as a blogpost-length comment.
This is a lovely post otherwise but you've obviously been drinking if you think you could get away with "an enzyme…
terrasig | August 20, 2007As noted in the previous post on the anticoagulant, Coumadin (warfarin), last week demonstrated how pharmacogenetic variations in drug metabolism and drug responses are giving rise to what is increasingly known as "personalized medicine."
In their second such warning last week, the US FDA alerted clinicians and the public to the use of codeine in nursing mothers. Not well known to most people is that codeine is metabolically activated to morphine by a drug metabolizing enzyme called CYP2D6. While we normally think of drug metabolism as breaking down a drug, the chemical conversions…
terrasig | August 19, 2007Late last week saw two announcements from the US FDA on genetic issues in drug safety. The first of these addresses the prescribing guidelines for Coumadin, or warfarin. Coumadin is a "blood-thinner" (or anticoagulant) prescribed for conditions from heart valve and hip/knee joint replacements to pulmonary hypertension and following strokes due to inappropriate blood clotting.
The reasons for this warning relate to data that has accumulated whereby individual patients respond quite differently to the same dose of Coumadin. Two genetic markers have been identified to account for much of…