The Best Description of Personalized Medicine
An excerpt from an article at Wired Science with the best description of personalized medicine ever (in red):
After talking about the tricky task of turning genetic variations associated with population-level risks of disease into medically advice useful for a single person sitting in an exam room, the panel was asked whether they’d recommend gene testing for everyone.
“For healthy patients with no family risks for anything, I wouldn’t advise tests for anything,” Lawrence Brody from the NHGRI said. Rosen voiced his own agreement, and Jeffrey Gulcher of DeCode Genetics nodded.
…personalized medicine would be a wonderful thing, but it’s a long ways off. In the meantime, doctors have a tough time with probabilities and the limitations of predictive values. And direct-to-consumer genetic tests are a crock.
It’s an important and hard question. If we shouldn’t test healthy patients, then why they test for cystic fibrosis in almost all the newborns regardless of ethnicity in the US?
Related links:
Very nice blog Bertalan.
The description of personalized (genomic) medicine is a good one but doesn’t really capture the essence of personalized medicine – in the sense of not just genetic personalization but also anatomic (somatic) personalization, etc. Ultimately, medicine interacts at the level of phenotype – not genotype – and to this extent focusing solely on the genetic aspects of personalized medicine is fairly limited. For some additional discussion on personalized medicine, see the blog entries on the new Life Sciences Business & Investment Daily blog at:
http://blog.aesisgroup.com/categories/Personalized%20Medicine.aspx
One of these is a 4 minute audio (.mp3) Podcast (http://blog.aesisgroup.com/2007/08/02/personalized-medicine-a-brief-audio-mp3-podcast.aspx ) and another article (http://blog.aesisgroup.com/2007/04/16/personalized-medicine-and-technology-convergence-decisive-trends.aspx ) talks about the relationship between personalized medicine, convergent medical technologies and theranostics.
Cheers,
Ogan
Dear Ogan!
Thank you for the comment and the link! I must add you to my blogroll and feedreader.
I’m also going to check those audio files.
Berci
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