A simple test could have spared him

Ontario and other provinces won't cover DNA examination that typically costs about $500

- MASIH KHALATBARI, PATRICK PEARSON

Shortly after starting a new medication, Jim Halliday began experiencing intense, debilitating side effects.

Jim Halliday was sweating and convulsing. The soles of his feet started itching.

“I had to rip my shoes off. It was uncontrollable,” he recalls.

Halliday, a former managing director at the Bank of Montreal, wondered if the intense symptoms were related to his first dose of a new medication he started taking the night before.

His doctor had prescribed a common antidepressant off-label to treat dizziness.

The doctor initially dismissed the idea that the drug could be to blame. After a few days, as symptoms intensified, he eventually told Halliday to stop taking it.

But Halliday’s symptoms continued to worsen and new ones set in. He started waking up with his limbs stiffly sticking straight up in the air.

For nearly three years, he searched for an explanation until a new doctor told him to take a pharmacogenetic test. It revealed all of Halliday’s suffering might have been avoided.

Pharmacogenomic testing uses DNA to examine how a patient’s genes affect the way their body responds to specific drugs. Tests typically cost around $500. No Canadian provincial health insurance currently covers the tests except in special circumstances.

If widely implemented, pharmacogenomic testing would save lives, avoid tragic side effects from drug interactions gone wrong and help doctors treat conditions more effectively, say many medical genetics experts. The tests could help reduce trial and error as prescribing doctors try to find the drug likeliest to help a patient.

The U.K.’s public health-care system is already taking steps toward it. But in Canada, governments question whether the cost to the public health-care system would be worth the benefits.