General knowledge about health and medicine increases all the time. A relatively new area in individualized medicine today is pharmacogenomics.
We often search the web for information about a health problem we’re facing before we decide to visit a doctor. General Practitioners will usually look at the symptoms and decide which way to go: prescribe a cure or refer for a further, more detailed, analysis.
How Genes Affect Your Response to Medicine
What happens if this process and the treatments that follow do not bring results? In some cases, the health condition can even deteriorate. Then we have a way forward, which will bring us as close as possible to the cure and restoration of good health. A part of precision and personalized medicine worth understanding is pharmacogenomics.
In other words, we can have a tailor-made treatment for each person or for a group of patients with the same or very similar genetic predisposition in relation to the reaction to a particular medicine.
How Does Pharmacogenomics Work?
In order to understand how pharmacogenomics works, we need to understand how a certain medicine works in our body. We want to know it does to the cells it is targeted for. The fact is that some people’s cells react exactly as required and expected. From the other hand, somebody else’s cells have quite a different reaction or no reaction at all.
When the latter occurs, the doctor has to consider different treatment routes. In order to avoid such complications and to shorten the road to health and wellbeing, there are pharmacogenomics tests available today worldwide.
Pharmacogenomic testing identifies how your genes affect your response to medications. Getting a test done may help your doctor adjust your medications to be more effective for you.
Proactive Genetic Tests
Hereditary diseases in their underlying base have one or more genomic disorders leading to a series of very specific clinical manifestations.
If an individual has a close relative in the family with a particular disease, he or she enters a group of people with high genetic sensitivity for developing a disease.
Our partner St. Catherine Specialty Hospital from Croatia together with the American company, Invitae; offers three tests to assess your risk for the development of 45 genetically determined diseases. These tests analyse the most significant genetic mutations associated with an increased risk of developing hereditary forms of malignant diseases of a range of organs.
These three proactive genetic tests are the following:
Cancer Screen: Tests for an increased risk of inherited cancers, including breast, ovarian, colon, and prostate cancer.
Cardio Screen: Tests for an increased risk of developing cardiomyopathies, arrhythmias, and genetic forms of high cholesterol.
Genetic Health Screen: Includes all the conditions in the Cancer Screen and Cardio Screen, along with several additional medically actionable conditions.
Conclusion
Genomic medicine uses DNA variation to individualise and improve human health. The idea that genetic variation can be used to individualise drug therapy is often viewed as within reach for genomic medicine. The researchers have been reviewing general mechanisms underlying variation in mediating beneficial and adverse effects. It is done through variable drug concentrations (pharmacokinetics) and drug actions (pharmacodynamics), available data from clinical trials, and ongoing efforts to implement pharmacogenetics in clinical practice.
