Document Type

Article

Publication Date

4-2022

Identifier

DOI: 10.1111/cts.13216; PMCID: PMC9010264

Abstract

The current pediatric mental health crisis is characterized by staggering rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide. Beyond this, first-line pharmacologic interventions for depressive and anxiety disorders in children and adolescents produce variable responses with two in five youths failing to respond. Given the heterogeneity of treatment response in pediatric depressive and anxiety disorders, pharmacodynamic biomarkers are necessary to develop precision therapeutics by identifying clear targets to guide treatment. This mini-review summarizes candidate biomarkers and their development in pediatric mental health conditions. A framework for how these biomarkers may relate to safety, efficacy (e.g., surrogates for clinical endpoints), tolerability or target engagement (i.e., drug action) in children and adolescents is also presented. Taken together, accumulating data suggest that, in children and adolescents with myriad psychiatric disorders, pharmacodynamic biomarkers could facilitate developing drugs with well-defined targets in specific populations, could inform treatment decisions, and hasten patients' recovery.

Journal Title

Clin Transl Sci

Volume

15

Issue

4

First Page

816

Last Page

823

MeSH Keywords

Adolescent; Adolescent Psychiatry; Anxiety; Anxiety Disorders; Biomarkers; Child; Humans

Keywords

Adolescent; Adolescent Psychiatry; Anxiety; Anxiety Disorders; Biomarkers; Child; Humans

Comments

Grant support

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.

Publisher's Link: https://ascpt.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cts.13216

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