Title : Bridging genetics, healthy aging, wellness and biosafety through the view of personalized and precision medicine (PPM) as a unique healthcare model of the next-step generation
Abstract:
The medicine of the XXI century is Personalized & Precision Medicine (PPM), by protecting and preserving human health throughout the life. PPM focuses on predictive and preventive measures that contribute to the development of individualized strategies for managing a healthy lifestyle that stabilize morbidity rates and can help to improve the working capacity of the population. PPM transforms healthcare by tailoring prevention, diagnosis, and treatment strategies to individual characteristics such as genetics, molecular profiles, environmental (exposomal) factors, and lifestyle. Meanwhile, aging is a versatile process characterized by progressive declines in physiological function, increased susceptibility to chronic diseases, such as diabetes, dementia, and chronic kidney disease, and heightened vulnerability to adverse health outcomes. All of those have the aging process itself as the main risk factor and increase exponentially in prevalence as a function of age – chronic disorders cause an enormous burden of poor quality of life to patients, relatives and caregivers and immense costs to the society. In this sense, beyond the search for the fountain of youth, the implementation for strategies aimed at the maintenance of health and vitality in the population is key. Identification of biomarkers, metrics and actions focusing on intrinsic capacity over the course of life to achieve and maintain a biologically young phenotype is a public health priority.
In this context, geriatric medicine stands to benefit heavily from the integration of PPM into its standard practices. In this sense, PPM-driven health tools and practices support healthy aging in several ways:
(i) Disease prevention and risk reduction;
(ii) Highly efficient targeted treatment for cancer and other diseases;
(iii) Improved health monitoring and pre-early intervention.
In addition to pharmacological options and nutriceuticals, we would emphasize the increasing role of modern gene and cell-based therapies, targeted biologics, and RNA-based therapeutics, which may be tailored with high specificity and minimal systemic side effects. These frontier treatments frequently informed by genomic profiling have the potential to revolutionize chronic illness care in the elderly. PPM and geriatric medicine as a medical tandem of the next-step generation offers a unique opportunity to resolve the complexities of aging and develop PPM-guided interventions that promote healthy aging, prevent age-related diseases, and improve quality of life for older adults. By integrating individualized genetic information, biomarker profiles, and lifestyle data, PPM-driven approaches can identify individuals at risk of age-related conditions such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, neurodegenerative disorders, diabetes, and frailty, enabling pre-early intervention and targeted prevention strategies. Precision diagnostic technologies, predictive and prognostic tools, advanced therapies and rehabilitative procedures has been held in high regard in geriatric care, especially as the world population continues to age and the question of management of diseases that are multi-morbid and chronic becomes more pronounced. Meanwhile, the introduction of PPM to geriatric care offers a variety of obstacles that need to be resolved to ensure a positive outcome, including economic, moral, and logistical challenges. PPM has a chance to become a landmark in the realm of aging-related healthcare with constant research and innovation to help people and provide them with what they need. Age-related diseases share the aging process itself as main risk factor; therefore, the aging process and the aged person should be the focus of investigations and interventions targeting, respectively, aging instead than organs and the person with the disease rather than the disease itself. Opportunities exist at every stage of the life span – there is a need for an individual to develop a Personalized Health Plan (PHP) addressing lifestyle, risk modification and disease management, and later, Personalized Health Management & Wellness Program (PHM&WP). So, a combination of genomic and phenome-related biomarkers is becoming of great significance to be applied in PPM and need to be translated into the daily practice to predict risks of the disease chronification and thus of disabling. PPM has drastically changed and is keeping on changing the landscape of healthcare. In reality, PPM is the new revolution in medicine which is dramatically modifying the traditional paradigm in medicine with huge consequences for health care systems. Putting PPM-tools in the area of geriatric medicine is expanding globally, dictated by healthcare standards and driven by demographic changes. Older people present diverse clinical profiles, marked not only by their advanced age but also by the presence of multiple chronic diseases, as well as problems in the functional and psychosocial spheres. This approach will be possible only with the integration of data across levels of influence and analytic wisdom in using those data toward better identification of disease and lifestyle risks. In this sense, all healthcare professionals of the future should be educated to deliver patient-centric care as members of interdisciplinary teams, emphasizing evidence-based practice, quality improvement approaches and bioinformatics. Therefore, greater collaboration between clinician and patient (or person-at-risk) would replace the traditional clinician-dominated dialogue with more effective patient-clinician partnerships. As the PPM-driven geriatric care continues to evolve, integrating genetic profiles into geriatric care offers a promising avenue for enhancing the efficacy, safety, and quality of life for older adults. And biomedical data from individuals can be analyzed with individualized genomic and environmental data to determine the drivers of health and well-being. This approach should be based on postulates, which will change the incarnate culture and social mentality! In this connection, the healthcare providers, public policy sector, and consumer industries will be required to develop new and creative models and products. And, no doubt, next generations will speak about the XXI century as a time, when medicine became preventive and personalized, and its outcomes – predictive and guarantied.
