Home »Unlabelled » Medical Humanities Blog

Medical Humanities Blog

On The Relevance of Genetic Screening for Population Health

Posted: 20 Oct 2010 11:23 AM PDT

As this is Open Access Week, it is fitting to note yet another superb article appearing in PLoS Medicine, which is fast becoming my favorite medical journal. The article is entitled Being More Realistic about the Public Health Impact of Genomic Medicine and is, like all articles published in the journal, available full-text, open-access (with commenting function, to boot). There is no Abstract, but here are the Summary Points:

Before genomic information is used in public health screening, it must be shown that:

such information predicts disease risk better than phenotypic information;
cost-effective interventions exist for those at increased genetic risk;
these interventions are more cost-effective than population-level interventions;
genetic risk information motivates desired behaviour change.

Currently there are no examples of genetic screening for disease risk that satisfy these criteria.

A running theme on MH Blog has been my dubiety of the existence of close connections between genetic science/medicine and population health. The article persuasively underscores such doubts, and specifically does so in-context of the merits of a whole-population approach to public health (in contrast to the currently dominant high-risk approach, a subject I have touched on here).

The article is highly recommended.