This contrasts with biomedicine, where the focus is on specific diseases, organs, symptoms, or mechanisms.
Gene therapy attempted to transport altered genes into the body to help fight specific diseases.
It used estimates of the incidence of specific diseases and of the number of people exposed to second-hand smoke in particular areas.
What they do instead is scan your DNA for markers associated with specific diseases. 23andMe tracks 58 diseases and conditions, deCode offers 26, and Navigenics 18.
Despite the understanding that specific diseases may afflict relatively small numbers of individuals, this overall growing pool of patients is now becoming an attractive opportunity for the pharmaceutical industry.
In 2005, Jamie and another brother, Benjamin, founded a website called PatientsLikeMe, which seeks to empower patients suffering from specific diseases, offering not just support but also an opportunity to share data and evaluate potential treatments.
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But the long-term aim is to construct computational models of specific diseases based on the data being monitored, says Mark Spire, who is the president of the American Association of Bovine Practitioners and a member of the Kansas State team.
If we are to have medicines tailored to our own versions of specific diseases, rather than the one-size-fits-all type of potions and pills with which we're treated today, then each of us will need a genome scan in our medical files.
Other more important changes that will likely have a larger impact, but which are currently elective at this time, are the the adoption of accountable care organizations (ACOs) along with the concept of bundled payments for managing and treating specific diseases.
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Epidemiology has a long list of accomplishments, including most famously identification of the association of smoking with risk of lung cancer, but also encompassing the identification of many other exposures, medications, and infectious agents as risk factors or protective factors for specific diseases.
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Basically, the FTC judge this week said that Pom no longer can make advertising claims that the ancient juice actually helps cure or mitigate specific diseases such as cancer but that it can continue to promote pomegranate beverages as good and healthy for the body in general ways.
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The five days will see the establishment of new collaborations and discussions relating to how the objectives laid out in the Project roadmap (2012-2016) can be achieved, principally relating to the creation and maintenance of diseases specific genetic variation databases.
They have been able to uncover a treasure trove of hitherto unknown links between specific genetic variants and diseases such as cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
Most were tailor-made, engineered to carry specific genetic mutations to mimic human diseases and conditions like autism.
Of course, there is more to be learned about the impact of specific behaviors and exposures for individual diseases, and the analytic studies addressing these questions have their place.
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Perez adds that the current practice of health screenings for certain diseases, starting at a specific age, will become a thing of the past.
And so the idea is, wow, you know, there's a bunch of diseases like diabetes and Parkinson's where specific types of cells are destroyed.
Only last year, she said, Egli and Paull and their colleagues demonstrated that the nuclear transfer of eggs cells could generate patient-specific stem cell lines for potential cell replacement therapy to treat diseases like diabetes.
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Creating a part that is specific to a patient's organ takes on even more importance with diseases like bronchial malacia, in which conventional intervention is risky and often the alternative is life on a ventilator.
Diadexus scans the database for those few genes specific to one type of cancer, but not found in healthy tissue or other diseases.
Its evidence lists the practical problems to recovering the cost of treating diseases, and says a proposal to refund the money to the Welsh government instead of specific parts of the NHS "creates further complexity".
Only by understanding the subtle genetic variations in hundreds of thousands of people--by sifting out the molecular misnomers that predispose someone to a specific malady--will scientists learn how to better predict, diagnose and ultimately cure such difficult diseases as diabetes, schizophrenia and heart failure.
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