Adverse effects and stratified medicine

In this new paper, lead by Maria and Stephanie and another fruitful collaboration with Max Huhn and Stefan Leucht, we asked whether the need for the fashionable term precision medicine could be found in the variability in adverse effects (rather than treatment response?) of second generation antipsychotic drugs. It is good clinical practice to select treatment with respect to side effects rather than main effects, indicating that there might be differences between patients in their susceptibility to side effects; but how big these differences really are was unclear. Interestingly, we did find good evidence for variability in weight gain and prolactin elevation, suggesting that these side effects could in principle be reduced through personalized or stratified medicine, respectively. You can read the article here, and check out the code and data on github.