Personalized medicine as a dead end

I have written a lot that personalized medicine is misleading approach in the modern medicine development (see also here). A lot of resources were spent in vain and really progressive research suffered. Here is another article which describes the poor outcome of personalized medicine.

The researchers conducted a simulation study by generating a broad range of possible statistical interactions among common environmental exposures and common genetic risk markers related to each of the three diseases. Then they estimated whether such interactions would significantly boost disease prediction risk when compared with models that didn't include these interactions since, to date, using individual genetic markers in such predictions has provided only modest improvements.

For breast cancer, the researchers considered 15 common genetic variations associated with disease risk and environmental factors such as age of first menstruation, age at first birth, and number of close relatives who developed breast cancer. For type 2 diabetes, they looked at 31 genetic variations along with factors such as obesity, smoking status, physical activity, and family history of the disease. For rheumatoid arthritis, they also included 31 genetic variations, as well as two environmental factors: smoking and breastfeeding.

But, for each of these disease models, researchers calculated that the increase in risk prediction sensitivity - when considering the potential interplay between various genetic and environmental factors - would only be between 1% and 3% at best.

"Overall, our findings suggest that the potential complexity of genetic and environmental factors related to disease will have to be understood on a much larger scale than initially expected to be useful for risk prediction. The road to efficient genetic risk prediction, if it exists, is likely to be long," said Aschard.

"For most people, your doctor's advice before seeing your genetic test for a particular disease will be exactly the same as after seeing your tests," added Kraft.