Letter to the Editor
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2025. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Psychiatry. Sep 19, 2025; 15(9): 108222
Published online Sep 19, 2025. doi: 10.5498/wjp.v15.i9.108222
Unmet needs in precision psychiatry
Philipp G Sand, Timm B Poeppl, Vera Roessler
Philipp G Sand, Department of Psychiatry, University of Regensburg, Regensburg 93053, Bavaria, Germany
Philipp G Sand, Vera Roessler, Centre of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Special Education, Bezirkskrankenhaus Kaufbeuren, Kaufbeuren 87600, Bavaria, Germany
Timm B Poeppl, Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University of Regensburg, Regensburg 93053, Bavaria, Germany
Timm B Poeppl, Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy, and Psychosomatics, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen 52074, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
Author contributions: Sand PG and Roessler V assessed the index study and drafted the manuscript; Poeppl TB provided a critical review for important intellectual content and assisted with interpretation of data; and all authors thoroughly reviewed and endorsed the final manuscript.
Conflict-of-interest statement: All the authors report no relevant conflicts of interest for this article.
Open Access: This article is an open-access article that was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: https://creativecommons.org/Licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Corresponding author: Philipp G Sand, MD, Associate Professor, Department of Psychiatry, University of Regensburg, Universitätsstr. 84, Regensburg 93053, Bavaria, Germany. philipp.sand@ukr.de
Received: April 8, 2025
Revised: May 13, 2025
Accepted: July 23, 2025
Published online: September 19, 2025
Processing time: 140 Days and 10.3 Hours
Core Tip

Core Tip: A recent meta-analysis has suggested a 5-HTR1A promoter variant may predict antidepressant response. However, re-analysis of the original data unveiled numerous shortcomings pertaining to genetic exposure and interpretation of genetic findings. We alert to ambiguities that are likely to have introduced bias in the calculation of overall effects by muddling of alleles or entire genes, and by demographic inaccuracies. In part, these may be explained by specific features of genetic information that are not encoded in the DNA sequence, such as transcriptional orientation.