FAQ on Personalised Healthcare (various languages)
In one sense, personalised healthcare is nothing new. It is what doctors have aimed to provide for their patients through the exercise of their clinical judgement, backed up by specialist knowledge and the use of appropriate diagnostic procedures.
However, as research advances and we begin to understand more about the complexity of common diseases, it is clear that a standard approach to the treatment of cancer, heart diseases and other common physical and psychological disorders will not yield the results patients need. Increasingly therapies are being selected based on an understanding of the underlying genetic components of a condition and how these interact.
This has come to be known as Personalised Healthcare. Properly applied and adjunct to the clinical skills of doctors, it will open up new opportunities for preventing, treating or curing many currently intractable diseases. It is an area where there has been much hype (both positive and negative) about possibilities for progress.
We hope this booklet steers a middle way between these extremes and gives a balanced view of Personalised Healthcare as it is now and for the immediately foreseeable future. It is the result of a collaboration between the patient group EGAN (European Genetic Alliances’ Network) and Roche, with EGAN collecting commonly asked questions and Roche experts formulating answers that have then been checked by independent specialists.
This brochure is available in: English (updated in 2012), German and Dutch.