Personalised Health and Medicine

Research has shown that an individual’s unique characteristics, genetic profile and environmental factors, play a significant role in both disease susceptibility and in the response to treatment. Personalised medicine is a rapidly developing and growing field and aims to predict more accurately an individual’s predisposition to developing a disease, achieve better diagnoses, earlier (preventive) interventions, and targeted and more efficient drug therapies (pharmacogenomics) and customized treatment. More recently, attention is also given to more personalised prevention of (health-related) behavior. This course will focus on the current state of affairs, implications and future prospects of personalised prevention and treatment related to health behaviour (e.g. substance abuse) mental health (e.g. major depressive disorder, ADHD) and physical health (e.g. diabetes, coronary heart disease). Attention will be given to the use of polygenetic scores in decision-making processes related to prevention and treatment, and the role of interplay of genes and the environment (e.g. life events, stress, lifestyle). In addition, methodology to gain more insights into personalised programs as well as ethical aspects will be discussed.