If you or a close friend or family member suffers from depression, you may understand the difficulty in finding a medication and/or treatment plan that works. Oftentimes, a health care provider may prescribe one medication, only to find out after weeks (or months) that it doesn’t work, or it’s not the right dose.

And people change, making the right medication and/or dose challenging to determine dynamically.

In an effort to find a more effective approach, researchers are attempting to apply the concepts of precision medicine to this mental health disorder.

Precision medicine refers to better tailored treatments for each patient. Researchers have begun by gathering data – brain scans, blood work, patients’ subjective symptoms – and attempting to find subtypes of depression. From there, the goal is to find the best treatment for each subtype.

The same approach has worked in recent years in cancer treatment. It is the hope of these researchers – and everyone affected by depression – that we will find similar success.

You can read more about this here:

[Can precision medicine do for depression what it’s done for cancer? It won’t be easy](https://www.statnews.com/2018/05/09/precision-medicine-depression-treatment/?utm_source=STAT+Newsletters&utm_campaign=b08b5fb518-Daily_Recap&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8cab1d7961-b08b5fb518-149951437)