BioMed Central Blog

An answer to the problem of non-communicable diseases?

Every year non-communicable diseases (such as cancer, heart disease and diabetes) kill 36 million people worldwide, a quarter of whom die before the age of 60. This week’s high-level United Nations meeting tackled this issue. In anticipation of this meeting, many prominent scientists came together to write a statement, published in Genome Medicine, about the role of systems medicine in the prevention and treatment of non-communicable diseases.

Systems medicine can be thought of as a patient-centered holistic approach that combines medical information with wider knowledge about health and disease such as the effects of human genetics, environment  and behavior. The team proposed a grand vision based around the four ‘p’s - predictive, preventative, personalized and participatory - medicine.

Information and communication technologies are a vital element of this proposal, but so too are primary healthcare providers, who are able to look at a patient as a whole person. This is important because diseases appear to be somehow linked; that is, people with a non-communicable disease tend to suffer from two or more of them.

In response, Wylie Burke, also writing in Genome Medicine, acknowledged the potential of this approach but emphasized that progress will not be made without tackling social issues such as poverty, bad housing and restricted access to education and employment.

In all probability both approaches are likely to go hand in hand. Systems medicine will help untangle the complex relationships between lifestyle and disease, and will pinpoint opportunities for prevention. But without a drive towards better public health, the number of deaths from non-communicable diseases will continue to increase.

Posted by Maria Hodges at 16:57    Comments (0)