Predicting the genetic risk of suffering a disease will be a reality in five years in Spain. It will be introduced little by little in the cases in which it is useful and will help to specify the global risk for each person, as Ángel Carracedo, director of the Galician Public Foundation for Genomic Medicine, explains in COPE: “The first thing that will be is the breast cancer, perhaps colon rectal, prostate cancer, cardiovascular and osteoporosis risk.
It will be done through a simple saliva or blood test and they will tell us the risk of suffering from a disease with respect to the rest of the population. In other countries such as the United Kingdom and Finland they have already been introduced into the public health system. In Spain there are pilot projects towards this type of medicine that will allow measures to be taken before patients become ill or the situation worsens.
Precision medicine has radically changed the way cancer patients or rare or undiagnosed diseases are investigated. It is a novel discipline that analyzes the patient’s genetics, environment and lifestyle to select the treatment that might work best for your condition.
Personalized medicine refers to a medical model that uses characterization of people’s phenotypes and genotypes to tailor an appropriate therapeutic strategy to the right person at the right time. Care focuses on the patient so that health systems respond in the best possible way to their needs.