Why personalized medicine holds promise in diabetes

With the trend in health care moving toward an era of personalized medicine, there is much anticipation and hope that customized approaches to prevention and treatment based on a person's genetic make-up will result in better health outcomes. Some advances, most notably with prevention and treatment of breast and colon cancer, have been widely heralded, raising questions about the potential for personalized medicine for other common diseases, such as diabetes.

To address the prospects for personalized medicine in diabetes – a disease that afflicts more than 25 million Americans – investigators from Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have surveyed the field for existing research and published their findings in the January issue of Health Affairs. The authors are Allen Spiegel, the Marilyn and Stanley M Katz Dean and former director of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, and Meredith Hawkins, professor of medicine and director of Einstein's Global Diabetes Initiative.

The issues they tackle are pressing. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has estimated that, in 2007, diabetes cost the $174 billion in direct and indirect costs. The problem is also global: a recent study estimated the number of worldwide cases at 347 million – a number greater than the entire US population.