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:
- Genetic Testing: BlogMix and a funny video
- Helicos BioSciences towards personalized medicine
- Personalized Genetics/Genomics: Blogterview with Steven Murphy, MD
