Racial Labels Have Limited Use In Personalizing MedicinePosted in Articles, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive, United States on 2012-10-05 02:59Z by Steven |
Racial Labels Have Limited Use In Personalizing Medicine
Shots: NPR’s Health Blog
2011-05-09
For all the fanfare around personalized medicine, the idea has been fairly slow to take off.
Boosters have said if doctors had a patient’s DNA information it would be revolutionary: They could look for genetic risk of certain diseases or mutations that determine whether certain drugs are likely to work or not.
The cost of DNA sequencing keeps falling, yet genetic sequencing for medical use isn’t commonplace. In the meantime, doctors can, in theory, consider a patient’s race in anticipating health conditions that could pose a higher risk.
But a study published recently in PLoS One suggests that using race as a stand in for truly personalized genetic information may not work, especially in the most diverse cities (like New York and Los Angeles) that attract immigrants from around the world.
There’s a lot of genetic variability among races. And the genetic risk profiles for many people with mixed ancestry don’t fit neatly into any category…
Read the entire article here.