Personalised medicine: a transformative era in dementia research

Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form of dementia in ageing societies. As populations age, it is expected that this number will quadruple by the year 2050, placing a considerable burden on public health systems (Sloane et al, 2002). Currently available drugs only slightly affect disease severity and progression, Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia remain at present effectively untreatable (Siemieniuk et al, 2015). Interventions preventing, halting, or decelerating the progression would reduce the individual suffering of affects and would significantly relieve public health burden (Siemieniuk et al, 2015).

However, in recent years the advancements in research, diagnosis, treatment of Alzheimer’s and other dementias has heralded a phase of personalised medicine, which is also a part of precision medicine (Tooke et al, 2015). The concept of precision medicine, is an approach for disease prevention and treatment that is personalised to an individual’s specific pattern of genetic variability, environment and lifestyle factors (Reitz, 2016).