Last January 2015, the Precision Medicine Initiative was launched by the late President Barack Obama, which was a plan to support research into treatment and prevention strategies.
As cited on Salon, to catenate such environmental issues as animals feeding operations, agricultural practices, unconventional natural gas development and the built environment to such results as drug-resistant infections, diabetes and asthma control, pregnancy effects and obesity, the professor of environmental health sciences, epidemiology and medicine, and co-director of the Joint Geisinger-JHSPH Environmental Health Institute (EHI), have been working with electronic health record data. Together with Dr. Annemarie Hirsch, an epidemiologist in the EHI they are looking for ways to translate such findings into the delivery of more precise clinical care.
Knowing more how our health is related to the environment and social conditions may lead to better treatments and better preventive care. But before we can start, we have two problems according to a report on Archy Newsy. The first is that these data aren't being gathered. And if we were to start collecting them, health care providers wouldn't know it's used.
Many know that our genetics can shape our health, but so are these important factors. Which are social determinants of health and community, and social and physical environments?Social determinants of health include income, poverty, inequality and things like crime rates and the affluence of your neighborhood.
When we say physical environment, we mean whether your community is designed to be walkable, has access to healthy foods or has heavy industry.These factors can influence your health in direct and indirect ways. For example, having asthma or cancer by just breathing in poison from a factory. Or indirectly benefit your health by living in a neighborhood with access to healthy food within walking distance of your house.
Many studies have proved that these factors have a more powerful impact on health than make the individual biologic differences between people. For instance, income and educational attainment are strongly associated with hypoglycemia a known clinical risk factor in patients with diabetes. People in neighborhoods with limited healthy eating and physical activity resources have a higher danger of being diagnosed with type 2 Diabetes. The president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Dr. Risa Lavizzo-
Mourey knows that a child's life is predicted more by his ZIP code than his genetic code. That's not an overstatement. There is a huge discrepancy in life across the United States depending on where you are born. The highest-longevity places tend to be in the Northeast and West, while the lowest is in the south. While genetics and health care are critical, others have argued that the predictors of health are a ZIP code, race, and class trump genetics and healthcare.
