Making The Decision Whether Or Not To Have Genetic Testing

Personalised Medicine Encourages You To Take A More Active Role In Maintaining Your Health

Personalised medicine aims to individualise health care, rather than having doctors treat everyone with a particular disease with the same treatment plan. The personalised medicine tests of the future will combine information about your personal health history, family history, age, gene sequences, medical information such as blood sugar or cholesterol level, diet, environment and lifestyle. By assessing this information for each individual patient, doctors will be better able to predict the individual's risk for specific diseases, as well as diagnose diseases more confidently. In addition, in some cases this information will enable your doctor to design the safest and most effective treatment plan for you when you get sick.

Personalised medicine will not just enable your doctor to do his/her job better; it will help you maintain your own health more effectively. Genetic and nongenetic factors interact to influence our risks for many of the most common diseases. Thus, if you know the diseases for which you have the greatest genetic risk, you may be able to minimise your exposure to some of the nongenetic factors that increase your risk of developing that disease. In some cases, personalised medicine tests may enable you to avoid developing a specific disease entirely. In other cases, the information may allow you to delay the onset of the disease, or reduce the severity of the disease.