Do Racial and Ethnic Groups Show Differences in Drug Metabolism Enzymes?
More Programs and Publications Featuring Dr. Dana Powell Baker
In this program:
Do drug metabolism enzymes vary by racial and ethnic groups? Laboratory medicine scientists Dr. Brandy Gunsolus and Dr. Dana Powell Baker discuss the history of race correction in drug metabolism and what the corrections were based on.
Transcript
Interviewer:
Dr. Gunsolus, are there differences in drug metabolism enzymes among different racial and ethnic groups in the term of race correction if they're still used in clinical medicine?
Dr. Brandy Gunsolus:
So we just were discussing the race correction that laboratories are really trying to move away from. As far as drug metabolism, enzymes different among racial ethnic groups, there were some studies that were put out 10, 15, even 20 years ago, that made the suggestion, and what we have found now is that that is outdated information, that's old information, it doesn't really follow racial and ethnic groups. We're such a melting pot, especially here in the U.S. and other industrialized nations that you do not see this, you can't look at an individual and say, "Oh, I know what their genotypes and their phenotypes are going to be when it comes to drug metabolism," you have to test that, you can't assume it just because somebody looks a specific way.
Interviewer:
Right. And just to kind of bounce off what you were saying, yes, we are a big melting pot, but when you look at American produced data, you'll see African American or Asian American, Hispanic American, and that those within themselves are very broad categories, honestly, especially even from a genetic standpoint, that's what we're talking about, this had continued to go off of enzymes here of cytochrome P450. I had read an article, probably one of the ones you were referring to from like 10 or so years ago, and it was interesting because what they had mentioned was they were looking at different ethnic groups, and there was a group of people in China and they were talking about different groups within China, different ethnic groups within China, and even their genetic variation of this enzyme was different. So again, just to say that that already within one country that has the majority of their population is one, they're all mostly Chinese, right? You can't go off of that data and then have American data say, "Oh, Asian American, African American", that can be a very misleading, so...
Dr. Brandy Gunsolus:
Very much so.
Interviewer:
Dr. Baker, do you have anything to add to that?
Dr. Dana Powell Baker:
I was just going to say that just to your point, that being misled in that, that that's where we also end up ending with misdiagnosis or additional treatments that were probably unnecessary treatment or intervention, that probably didn't need to happen in the first place. I think that's really crucial to the conversation that we're having and really debunking what we're seeing with the race-based information in medicine.
Dr. Brandy Gunsolus:
Or even treatments that should have never happened, and treatments that would have happened, and didn't.
Dr. Dana Powell Baker:
A long time ago. [chuckle] Right.
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