Precision medicine is the personalized treatment of diseases. Precision health, nutrition, or wellness is personalized utilizing specific diets or lifestyle designed to prevent or treat chronic diseases based on a person’s unique characteristics, like DNA, ancestry, gender, health history, and lifestyle habits.
In precision nutrition, diverse populations may have different responses to specific foods and nutrients. The best diet for one population may look very different or even be harmful for another. The same thing can happen with particular lifestyles.
Why do we need this NOW?
Of 17 modifiable risk factors...Diet is #1.
We need to understand the mechanismsthat drive a disease in order to:
Challenges of Moving to True Health-Care from Our Current Sick-Care
We do NOT have an educated work force for this. There will be a huge need for health professionals who can interpret results and relay relevant and important information in a clear and concise manner.
Ethical considerations MUST be developed including the potential for misinterpretation of results by the consumer and, in the case of some genetic variants, a negative psychological reaction to the information.
We are out over our skis with direct-to-consumer genetic tests and health-related genetic tests without the involvement of a health professional. The number of companies offering tests that include personalized nutritional or dietary advice based on one’s individual genetic data has exploded (~100,000 test).
Inclusion of all racial/ethnic, ancestry, sexes, individuals, groups and populations. Diversity is critical to precision.
Continuing to develop technologies that can organize, analyze and make sense of the vast complexity of the human. This will require large transdisciplinary, coordinated teams of scientists.
