Not Yet: CDC panel questions antidepressant gene test

About half of all depressed people who take standard antidepressant drugs fail to improve. Some suffer unpleasant side effects and abandon the medicines, while others simply don’t feel better. Commercial tests claim to predict, by a genetic analysis, how well individual patients will fare on different antidepressants, but a panel convened by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta now says that the tests don’t work as advertised.