Screening for Complex Diseases and Personalized Health Care
1Section of Hygiene, Institute of Public Health, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Rome, Italy
2Institute for Translational Epidemiology, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, USA
3Department of Public Health and Infectious Diseases, Rome, Italy
Screening for Complex Diseases and Personalized Health Care
Description
Personalized healthcare can be defined as a customization of the medical provision that accommodates individual differences in all stages in the process, from prevention to diagnosis and treatment to posttreatment followup. While the term personalized medicine has a broader meaning and it comes from the explosion of information arising from genome sequencing, the term personalized healthcare refers more to the potential for customization in the provision of healthcare to the citizen.
Despite the fast moving human genome discoveries in a wide proportion of diseases having large public health impact, the promise of personalized healthcare has far lagged behind. In a time of limited resources, the multilevel interventions required for such integration might not be perceived as a priority from policy makers. Additionally, the evidence on the extent to which genomic information has provided measurable population health benefits and actionable intelligence to citizens is limited. Lastly, the march of technological advances has accelerated faster than progresses of the concurrent clinical and public health models. Public health practitioners are now called to make efforts not only to demonstrate when genomics actually improves health but also to create the infrastructure needed to drive health benefits in the future. It is also important to strengthen the evidence base supporting traditional screening strategies for complex diseases, given the increasing burden of chronic diseases on populations.
With this special issue, we particularly take an interest in manuscripts that report on the issues surrounding the determinants of (genetic) screening for complex diseases and on the policy and societal factors affecting the implementation of a personalized health care approach. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:
- Systematic reviews in the fields of personalized health care and screening for complex diseases
- Public health genomics
- The prevalence and determinant of (genetic) tests in the population
- The perception of genetic tests from citizens/physicians
- The Direct-to-Consumers tests (legislation/perception, etc.)
- The medical education in the field of public health genomics
Before submission authors should carefully read over the journal’s Author Guidelines which are located at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/bmri/guidelines/. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/submit/journals/bmri/public.health/dph/ according to the following timetable: