Aggregated News
For all the fanfare around personalized medicine, the idea has been fairly slow to take off.
Boosters have said if doctors had a patient's DNA information it would be revolutionary: They could look for genetic risk of certain diseases or mutations that determine whether certain drugs are likely to work or not.
The cost of DNA sequencing keeps falling, yet genetic sequencing for medical use isn't commonplace. In the meantime, doctors can, in theory, consider a patient's race in anticipating health conditions that could pose a higher risk.
But a study published recently in PLoS One suggests that using race as a stand in for truly personalized genetic information may not work, especially in the most diverse cities (like New York and Los Angeles) that attract immigrants from around the world.
There's a lot of genetic variability among races. And the genetic risk profiles for many people with mixed ancestry don't fit neatly into any category.
Researchers at the Mount Sinai Medical Center sequenced the DNA of nearly 1,000 local participants who identified themselves as European American, African-American, or Hispanic...
Boosters have said if doctors had a patient's DNA information it would be revolutionary: They could look for genetic risk of certain diseases or mutations that determine whether certain drugs are likely to work or not.
The cost of DNA sequencing keeps falling, yet genetic sequencing for medical use isn't commonplace. In the meantime, doctors can, in theory, consider a patient's race in anticipating health conditions that could pose a higher risk.
But a study published recently in PLoS One suggests that using race as a stand in for truly personalized genetic information may not work, especially in the most diverse cities (like New York and Los Angeles) that attract immigrants from around the world.
There's a lot of genetic variability among races. And the genetic risk profiles for many people with mixed ancestry don't fit neatly into any category.
Researchers at the Mount Sinai Medical Center sequenced the DNA of nearly 1,000 local participants who identified themselves as European American, African-American, or Hispanic...