Everyone’s body is a little bit different. So it is important to understand our personal biological makeup while we are still healthy, so deviations from these healthy baselines can be used to detect early signs of disease. That’s key to precision health.
“We generally study people when they’re sick, rarely when they’re healthy, and it means we don’t really know what ‘healthy’ looks like at an individual biochemical level,” said Stanford geneticist Michael Snyder, PhD, in a recent Stanford news release.
As part of an international collaboration, Snyder used big data approaches to profile and track the health of more than 100 people at risk for diabetes for up to eight years. Participants underwent extensive testing each quarter, including clinical laboratory testing, exercise and physiological testing, microbial and molecular assessments, genetic sequencing, cardiovascular imaging and wearable sensor monitoring using smart watches or glucose monitors.
The goal of the study was to evaluate whether the emerging technologies could detect diseases early. During the study, the researchers discovered over 67 major clinically-actionable health issues — spanning across metabolism disorders, cardiovascular disease, cancer, blood disorders and infectious diseases. Namely, most of the participants had an unknown potential health problem flagged by the study, as reported in a paper recently published in Nature Medicine.
“We caught a lot of health issues because we noticed their delta, or their change from baseline. For instance, we caught nine people with diabetes as it was developing by continuously monitoring their glucose and insulin levels,” Snyder explained in the release. He added, “We were able to catch a lot of things before they were even symptomatic. And in most cases, it either led to folks being followed more carefully or to a medical intervention.”
The research team also used the big datasets to discover new biomarkers that may be able to predict the risk of cardiovascular and certain other diseases. Although preliminary, these results have inspired them to conduct larger follow-up studies.
This approach of extensively tracking personal health is currently too expensive to implement into standard health care on a broad scale, according to Snyder. But he hopes the prices will drop as more researchers and physicians innovate in the space.
“Ultimately, we want to shift the practice of medicine from treating people when they are ill to a focus on keeping them healthy by predicting disease risk and catching disease before it is symptomatic,” Snyder said.
This is a reposting of my Scope blog story, courtesy of Stanford School of Medicine.
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