Preventing Chronic Disease (Mar 2005)
Genomics and the Prevention and Control of Common Chronic Diseases: Emerging Priorities for Public Health Action
Abstract
The completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003 continues to raise expectations on near-term applications of human genome discoveries in personalized disease prevention, especially in the area of common chronic diseases (1,2). In fact, almost daily we are confronted with stories of scientific discoveries of human genetic variants that are suggested to affect our risks for one or more of the major common chronic diseases. (See Table 1 for an illustrative sample of news stories published online during December 2004 [3].) Yet the immediate significance of most of these discoveries remains elusive. Despite the scientific excitement and the predictions for personalized prevention and drug treatment, the promise of human gene discovery for health promotion and disease prevention is yet to be fulfilled (4).
