Personalized medicine

According to a recent article in Time, the number of people who must take a drug to avoid a single adverse event (e.g. a heart attack) is called the "number needed to treat" (NNT).  For statins, the NNT is around 50 people.  In other words, for every heart attack avoided, 49 people were taking statins to no benefit, with all the potential side-effects (and cost) that entails.

Pharmacogenetics and personalized medicine are trying to change that by rationalizing who is treated.  One way to do that is by creating genetic tests, to see who responds better to certain drugs.  If the NNT were reduced to 1, that would mean everyone would receive only the drugs they needed. 

But it would also mean a 50-fold decrease in drug sales, which is why pharmaceutical companies are trying to downplay personalized medicine (or, rather, to use it to predict drug safety, but not efficacy).  Saving healthcare costs is probably what Senator Barack Obama had in mind last year, when he introduced the "Genomics and Personalized Medicine Act of 2006" that would "improve access to ... genetic tests by all populations".  That bill hasn't passed, yet, but it could revolutionize the way healthcare is administered, especially if Obama is elected president in 2008.

Comments

[Steve]

It's scary that most of the ecost effectiveness models fail to take NNT into account. When you do that, it is easy to see how advantageous PGx is and will become.
Thanks
Steve
-http://thegenesherpa.blogspot.com