Although there are many problems with precision medicine, I think this is a great field to be further expanded. Genetics can help improve medicine towards more personalization with patients, but there are still too much unknown to put it into practice. One day though, I think personalized medicine will be of great use.
Monday, February 9, 2015
Genetics for Improving Medicine
According to the NY Times, millions of dollars have been budgeted towards precision medicine through President Obama. The idea behind precision medicine is to use genetics to improve medicine. This means that by identifying genetic variants in people by reading the genetic code the proper treatment will be used so that it is most precise. However, precision is unlikely to make people healthier. There are many problems that arise trying to simply use a person's genetic code to see what treatment would be most responsive. As the Human Genome Project has shown, finding what a person is truly at risk for is really difficult. This is because there are many genetic variants, but having a clear picture is difficult since there is no clear genetic story for widespread diseases like diabetes and cancer. Another problem is that the genetic variants do not show for a person's increased risk of a disease due to the problem of missing heritability.
Obama has called precision medicine a great opportunity that will allow for the right treatments at the right time for every person. DNA testing has definitely proved useful in detecting and treating various conditions, but personalized medicine is not quite in reach just yet. The main issue is trying to interpret the information gathered through genetics although there are connections drawn between DNA data and health outcomes. Mistakes are too frequent to consider personalized medicine, because there is so much to look at that the tiniest blip in test results can mean there is a certain disease or there is not. This is shown in the case of a child who underwent a DNA test to see if her condition was related to a genetic cause, and the results were mistaken to be true when actually not.
Although there are many problems with precision medicine, I think this is a great field to be further expanded. Genetics can help improve medicine towards more personalization with patients, but there are still too much unknown to put it into practice. One day though, I think personalized medicine will be of great use.
Although there are many problems with precision medicine, I think this is a great field to be further expanded. Genetics can help improve medicine towards more personalization with patients, but there are still too much unknown to put it into practice. One day though, I think personalized medicine will be of great use.
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