Response to chlorpromazine treatment may be associated with polymorphisms of the DRD2 gene in Chinese schizophrenic patients.

Shengnan Wu, Qinghe Xing, Rui Gao, Xingwang Li, Niufan Gu, Guoyin Feng, Lin He

Bio-X Life Science Research Center, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 1954 Huashan Road, Shanghai 200030, PR China.

Neuroscience letters 2005 Mar 7

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Previous studies have demonstrated that the -141C Ins/Del and TaqI A polymorphisms in the DRD2 gene affect the density of the dopamine D2 receptor. The present study examines the correlation between these two polymorphisms and the therapeutic response to chlorpromazine, a typical antipsychotic drug, in 135 inpatients with schizophrenia. Clinical symptoms were evaluated using the Brief Psychiatry Rating Scale (BPRS) before and after 8 weeks of treatment with 300-600 mg/day of chlorpromazine. Our results show that genotyping -141C Ins/Del may help to predict the efficacy of chlorpromazine treatment (P=0.01) due to the fact that patients with no Del allele showed greater improvement than those with Del allele on the overall BPRS (P=0.03), and that, therefore, the potential for therapy in patients with schizophrenia is related to the -141C Ins/Del polymorphism in the DRD2 gene. However, no such relationship was found for the TaqI A polymorphism.

Citation

Shengnan Wu, Qinghe Xing, Rui Gao, Xingwang Li, Niufan Gu, Guoyin Feng, Lin He. Response to chlorpromazine treatment may be associated with polymorphisms of the DRD2 gene in Chinese schizophrenic patients. Neuroscience letters. 2005 Mar 7;376(1):1-4