The GeneSight test fosters therapeutic relationships with patients

My name’s Anne-Marie DiPietro. I’m a board-certified family psychiatric nurse practitioner, and I practice in West Chester, Pennsylvania. Which is a suburb of Philadelphia.

About five years ago, I started using GeneSight. Specifically, I was working at a residential facility for children with autism and intellectual disabilities. They had very high risk, dangerous, challenging behavior and were on upwards of seven psychotropics each. In my private practice, it’s been really helpful because I see a lot of people with depression where SSRIs have been completely inadequate.

And a lot of times the genomic testing gives us an answer as to why some of the failed trials may not have been successful. And it gives us the tools to get them to that response and remission even faster. And I’ve absolutely seen that in my private practice.

One thing that I like a lot is that I feel like it fosters the therapeutic relationship with the patient, where you’re able to have a conversation with them about this is what your genes look like and this is what your genes tell us about you.

And I think it gives buy-in where, you know, I’ve had kids that have come to me and said, it’s hopeless. Nothing’s ever going to get better. I’ve already tried six or seven medications, and I feel just as bad as I did before. And then they get their GeneSight results and they’re looking at it in front of them and saying, Anne-Marie, all of the meds are in the red category that I tried. And they feel this hope, you know, for the first time that maybe this isn’t the end and things can get better.

So for me, that patient buy-in is really important. And then on the other end for us as prescribers, we’re able to say, OK, look at this SLC 684 mutation. I’m not going to go through the list of SSRIs here. I’m going to try something with a more novel mechanism of action, and I’m going to get someone feeling better in two to four weeks instead of three and a half trials down the line.