BRIDGE Webinar: Paul Franks, Lund University, Sweden
Lifestyle and Diabetes Precision Medicine
Abstract
The concept of precision medicine focuses on the optimization of recommendations or therapy using patient-level biomarker data; this new approach to preventing, diagnosing, monitoring and treating many different types of disease, has stimulated enormous interest throughout society, as it provides hope of more effective, less costly and safer ways of tackling numerous high-burden diseases. Whilst precision diabetes medicine is often framed in the context of pharmacotherapy, using biomarkers to personalize lifestyle recommendations intended to lower type 2 diabetes risk or to slow progression, is also conceivable. There are at least four ways in which this might work: i) by helping predict a person’s susceptibility to adverse lifestyle exposures; ii) facilitating the stratification of type 2 diabetes into subclasses, some of which may be prevented or treated optimally with specific lifestyle interventions; iii) discovery of prognostic biomarkers that help guide timing and intensity of lifestyle interventions; iv) predicting treatment response. In my lecture I will overview the rationale for precision diabetes medicine, specifically as it relates to lifestyle; I will scrutinize existing evidence, discuss the barriers germane to this field, and consider how this work is likely to proceed over the coming years.
Paul W. Franks
Head, Genetic & Molecular Epidemiology Unit, Lund University, Sweden
Professor of Genetic Epidemiology, Lund University, Sweden
Professor of Nutrition (adjunct), Harvard University, USA
Guest professor, Umeå University, Sweden