Prescribing by Taste

In the good (?) old days, the family doctor used to make sure that your medicine tasted terrible. The worse it tasted, the quicker you recovered. Remember? Nowadays efforts are made to disguise the taste to make medicines more attractive; this just means they have to make the child-proof caps much harder for anyone to open.

A new discovery has just been described that brings taste back into the choice of medicines in a scientific way. It’s known that depression, like other mental disorders, can influence the sense of taste. UK researchers have found that serotonin and norepinephrine – two brain chemical substances – can alter taste thresholds, while the corresponding level of one or other of these substances is disturbed in depressed patients. By subjecting newly depressed patients to a taste-test, doctors are able to determine which of two types of antidepressants will be most effective for that patient; either a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), or a norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor. The taste tests involved the ability (or not) to taste a threshold amount of a sweet, sour or bitter substance.

Since present-day antidepressants take a considerable period to work (a matter of a few weeks) any short-cut to determine the likely effective drug is more than welcome, even if it means tasting something nasty first.