Is my PET in my genes?

Excerpt

Precision medicine holds the promise of individualized care. Thus, while traditional evidence-based medicine, with its reliance on large randomized controlled trials, can only provide prognostic and treatment information for a defined group of patients, precision medicine aims to go beyond that, by providing accurate information on treatment response and prognosis for each individual patient. Thereby, precision medicine tries to address the problem of the large spectrum of severity within a given clinical group, by identifying the genetic and environmental factors that contribute to the phenotypic diversity. Imagine that you could with reasonable accuracy predict beforehand whether a patient with, for instance, IgA nephropathy will eventually have spontaneous resolution or progressive chronic kidney disease, whether this will respond to immunosuppression and, if so, which drug will work best with the least side effects! Or, as we will discuss here, whether a patient with kidney failure is likely to do well on peritoneal dialysis (PD) or not and with what kind of PD prescription. …