Personalized Medicine: Concept and Advantages

In this article we will discuss about Personalized medicine:- 1. Concept of Personalized Medicine 2. Advantages of Personalized Medicine.

Concept of Personalized Medicine:

Personalized medicine is not to be confused with “genetic medicine”. Personalized medicine is a medical concept/model that proposes the customization of health care, with all decisions and practices being transcribed to the indi­vidual patient by use of genetic or other infor­mation.

It is a young but advancing field of health care that is based on each person’s unique clinical, genetic, genomic, and environ­mental information. Because these factors are different for every person, the nature of dis­eases—including their onset, their course, and how they might respond to drugs or other in­terventions—is as individual as the people who have them.

Personalized medicine is about making the treatment as individualized as the disease. It involves identifying genetic, ge­nomic, and clinical information that allows accurate predictions to be made about a person’s susceptibility of developing disease, the course of disease, and its response to treat­ment.

Practical application to this concept is absolutely limited to the conventional/tradi­tional considerations like a patient’s family history, social circumstances, environment and behaviours and no such significant progress has been made in the last decade.

Advantages of Personalized Medicine:

a. Ability to make more informed medical de­cisions

b. Higher probability of desired outcomes due to better-targeted therapies

c. Reduced probability of negative side-effects

d. Focus on prevention and prediction of disease rather than reaction to it

e. Earlier disease intervention in comparison to the past

f. Reduced health care costs.

However, personalized or genomic medi­cine is not only for the individuals with illness because an individual’s genome influences his or her likelihood of developing (or not developing) a broad range of medical conditions, personalized medicine focuses strongly on wellness and disease prevention.

For example, if a person’s genomic information indicates a higher-than-average risk of developing diabe­tes or a particular form of cancer, that person may choose a lifestyle, or sometimes be pre­scribed medications, to better regulate the as­pects of health and wellness over which he or she has control.

The person may benefit in the long run from making preventive lifestyle choices that will help counteract the biological risk.

Genomic medicine may help determine a person’s risk of developing several specific medical conditions, including:

a. Cancer

b. Car­diovascular disease

c. Neurodegenerative dis­eases

d. Diabetes

e. Obesity

f. Neuropsychiatric disorders

Moreover researchers are actively investi­gating the genomic and genetic mechanisms behind—and developing predictive testing for—such diverse medical conditions as:

a. In­fectious diseases, from HIV/AIDS to the com­mon cold

b. Ovarian cancer

c. Cardiovascular disease

d. Diabetes

e. Metabolic abnormalities

f. Neuropsychiatric conditions, such as epi­lepsy

g. Adverse drug reactions

h. Environmen­tal exposure to toxins.