Pharmacogenomics for Improving Pediatric ADHD Treatment

The study is a randomized controlled trial (RCT) of pediatric Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) patients using an experimental group and a control group. The subjects in the experimental group will be administered a commercially available pharmacogenomics (PGx) test panel of 38 genes specifically related to drug metabolism rates and drug response. A subset of these genes are known to be involved in the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of ADHD medications. The PGx test report indicates if there are genetic variants detected related to ADHD medications and consequently provides recommendations for the clinician on which medications and doses may be optimally effective. The control group is the "treatment as usual" (TAU) group whose subjects are treated with medications for ADHD based on the treating clinician's customary method(s) for selecting medications and doses. The hypotheses to be tested are that PGx testing guidance will reduce the time it takes to reach a treatment regimen that improves patient symptom relief, reduces the frequency and severity of adverse drug reactions, improves patient quality of life, and reduces parental emotional stress. Additionally, since the test is performed using next-generation sequencing, we wish to tabulate relevant allele frequencies and use variant call files to discover previously unknown PGx genetic variants.