What Is Personalized Medicine and Why Is It Important?

Personalized medicine helps achieve the goal of more precise, predictable, and robust healthcare for each patient.

Can you expect a young child to wear a t-shirt or shirt the same size as their grandparents? Absolutely you cannot expect. But when individuals are sick, they receive the same medical treatment, although they have many differences. The main reason for this is that even the world's best scientists and doctors do not fully understand how diseases develop in humans and how they respond to treatments. Therefore, a one-size-fits-all drug approach is applied based on large population averages. Traditional practice does not usually have the same effect on everyone, as the genetic structure of each person is slightly different. Even small differences in people's genetic makeup can have important health consequences.

Personalized medicine helps achieve the goal of more precise, predictable, and robust healthcare for each patient. Advancing our knowledge of genetics and genomics on important issues such as how each person responds to drugs and diseases enables physicians to better prevent disease, diagnose better, prescribe safer drugs, and administer more effective treatment. The basis of Personalized medicine is the provision of health services in accordance with the unique genetic makeup of the person. Personalized medicine is also known as individualized medicine, precision medicine, or genomic medicine.

Benefits of Personalized Medicine

Throughout history, drug use has been seen by many as the last resort. Nowadays, we can usually take medicine for the treatment of this disease after getting sick. Because we do not fully understand the genetic and environmental factors that cause important diseases such as diabetes, cancer, and Alzheimer's. This is why our efforts to treat these diseases are ineffective, unpredictable, and uncertain.

The drugs and treatments we use are tested on a large population and prescriptions are written using statistical averages. As a result, due to genetic differences, drugs work in some patients, while in others they do not. On average, prescription drugs on the market today are effective in only half of the people who take them. Personalized medicine, which is prepared in accordance with the unique genetic structures of people, has begun to eliminate the limits of traditional medicines. Personalized medicine provides health care providers with the following benefits:

• Shift the emphasis in medicine from reaction to prevention

• Predicts susceptibility to disease

• Improves disease detection

• Preempt disease progression

• Customize disease-prevention strategies

• Provides more effective prescription drug use

• Prevents prescribing with predictable side effects

• Saves time and reduces cost

Connection Between Genetics and Medical Practice

Interactions between hundreds of genes and gene networks and external factors such as exercise and diet determine a person's biological characteristics. For example, hair color and cholesterol level. Genetic systems is a very comprehensive approach to study this biological complexity. Physicists, mathematicians, and geneticists use powerful statistical tools to process vast databases to create predictions of how genetic complexity affects health and disease.

Neurological diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease, produce similarly dire impacts. Alzheimer’s is the 6th leading cause of death in the United States, and the Alzheimer’s Association predicts that 16 million individuals will be living with the disease by 2050.

The financial, clinical, and social imperatives for finding treatments for these and other conditions have led to a surge in interest around personalized medicine. With much more digital data at their disposal and the computing power to crunch the numbers, researchers are now eagerly uncovering new relationships between genes, drugs, and populations.

In addition, you can get detailed information about healthcare management by reading our article titled Why Is Healthcare Management Crucial? See you on different topics.