The Value of Diagnostic Testing in Personalized Medicine.

Personalized medicine - the targeting of therapies to individuals on the basis of their biological, clinical, or genetic characteristics - is thought to have the potential to transform health care. While much emphasis has been placed on the value of personalized therapies, less attention has been paid to the value generated by the diagnostic tests that direct patients to those targeted treatments. This paper presents a framework derived from information economics for assessing the value of diagnostics.

Risk of weight gain associated with antipsychotic treatment: results from the Canadian National Outcomes Measurement Study in Schizophrenia.

Background: Antipsychotic-induced weight gain occurs in a substantial percentage of treated persons. There remains a paucity of naturalistic data that describe relative weight-gain liability with the available novel atypical antipsychotics (NAPs). This investigation describes comparative NAP-induced weight gain in a prospective naturalistic cohort of persons with schizophrenia and related psychotic disorders.