Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

PERSONALIZED MEDICINE

The future of individualized health maintenance

Nature Medicine volume 25, pages 712–714 (2019)Cite this article

Subjects

Multi-omics longitudinal profiling of individuals can detect subtle changes in health status at the earliest possible time point, allowing preemptive initiation of mechanism-appropriate disease-prevention strategies.

For the most part, medical care today determines your current status as ‘healthy’ or ‘sick’ by comparing you to a population of people, who, more often than not, may be nothing like you. As a blunt instrument, that is not all bad. When your oral temperature is well above the population’s norm of 37 °C, there is a good chance that you have some type of infection. Or if your primary care physician measures your blood pressure and finds it to be dangerously high relative to the normal distribution in a population, treating it over the long term can substantially decrease your risk of bad cardiovascular outcomes. However, being dependent upon population norms too often means that an unfavorable health trajectory can go unrecognized until late in its course, and, even when recognized, it is dealt with using therapeutic interventions that are not personalized. The promise of individualized, or precision, medicine, made possible through recent and ongoing advancements in ‘omics’ and personal sensor technologies, can markedly and continuously improve upon the current population-based approach to health maintenance and care. In this issue of Nature Medicine, a personalized medicine study is described by Schüssler-Fiorenza Rose et al., indicating the potential power of this approach for healthcare in the future1.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Relevant articles

Open Access articles citing this article.

Access options

Buy article

Get time limited or full article access on ReadCube.

$32.00

Buy

All prices are NET prices.

Fig. 1

Rancz Andrei / Alamy Stock Photo

References

  1. Schüssler-Fiorenza Rose, S. M. Nat . Med. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-019-0414-6 (2019).

  2. Shilaih, M., Clerck, V., Falco, L., Kubler, F. & Leeners, B. Sci. Rep. 7, 1294 (2017).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Huffaker, M. F., Carchia, M. & Harris, B. U. et al. Am. J. Respir. Crit. Care Med. 198, 320–328 (2018).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Zeevi, D., Korem, T. & Zmora, N. et al. Cell 163, 1079–1094 (2015).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  5. Catala, A., Culp-Hill, R., Nemkov, T. & D’Alessandro, A. Metabolomics 14, 100 (2018).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Li, L., Cheng, W. Y. & Glicksberg, B. S. et al. Sci. Transl. Med. 7, 311ra174 (2015).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Hall, H., Perelman, D. & Breschi, A. et al. PLoS Biol. 16, e2005143 (2018).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Parikh, R. B., Schwartz, J. S. & Navathe, A. S. New Engl. J. Med. 376, 1609–1612 (2017).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Hollands, G. J., French, D. P. & Griffin, S. J. et al. BMJ (Clin. Res. Ed.) 352, i1102 (2016).

    Google Scholar 

  10. Turnwald, B. P., Goyer, J. P., Boles, D. Z., Silder, A., Delp, S. L. & Crum, A. J. Nat. Hum. Behav. 3, 48 (2019).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Gigerenzer, G. & Garcia-Retamero, R. Psychol. Rev. 124, 179–196 (2017).

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Scripps Research Translational Institute, La Jolla, CA, USA

    Steven R. Steinhubl

Authors
  1. Steven R. Steinhubl
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Steven R. Steinhubl.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

S.R.S. is supported by the National Institutes of Health grants UL1TR001114 and U24OD023176 and a grant from the Qualcomm Foundation.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and Permissions

About this article

Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Steinhubl, S.R. The future of individualized health maintenance. Nat Med 25, 712–714 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-019-0443-1

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-019-0443-1

This article is cited by

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing