Metabolic activity of dextromethorphan O-demethylation in healthy Japanese volunteers carrying duplicated CYP2D6 genes: duplicated allele of CYP2D6*10 does not increase CYP2D6 metabolic activity.

Background: This study was designed to assess the metabolic activities of dextromethorphan O-demethylation in healthy Japanese subjects carrying duplicated CYP2D6 alleles, CYP2D6*1 x 2, CYP2D6*2 x 2 or CYP2D6*10 x 2.

Methods: Forty-one unrelated healthy Japanese subjects containing carriers who had previously been genotyped as CYP2D6*1 x 2/*2, CYP2D6*1/*2 x 2, and CYP2D6*10/*10 x 2 were phenotyped with dextromethorphan.

Results: The metabolic ratios of dextromethorphan/dextrorphan in subjects with CYP2D6*1 x 2/*2 or CYP2D6*1/*2 x 2 were lower than those in subjects with CYP2D6*1/*2, while the metabolic ratios in subjects with CYP2D6*10/*10 x 2, as well as homozygotes for CYP2D6*10, were significantly (P<0.01) higher than those in homozygotes for CYP2D6*1.

Conclusions: The results suggested that carriers with three functional CYP2D6 genes, CYP2D6*1 x 2/*2 or CYP2D6*1/*2 x 2, are ultrarapid metabolizer phenotypes in Japanese. The results also suggested that there is no gene-dose effect with the dextromethorphan O-demethylation activities between carriers with two and three CYP2D6*10 mutated genes per genome. Therefore, CYP2D6*10 x 2 may play an important role for the treatment of Japanese patients as well as CYP2D6*10 which is mainly responsible for the intermediate metabolizers in Japanese.