Ushering Hypertension Into a New Era of Precision Medicine

Liang and Colleagues, JAMA 2016

In a Viewpoint article published in the January 26, 2016, issue of JAMA, Ted Kotchen, Allen Cowley (a CoSMM member), and Mingyu Liang (CoSMM Director) made the case that precision medicine needs more than DNA sequences and epigenomic analysis can be a powerful tool for precision medicine for multifactorial diseases.

They stated, “Current efforts in precision medicine focus primarily, often exclusively, on genome sequences. … Genome sequences alone, however, do not account for environmental and lifestyle factors that also contribute to common complex diseases such as hypertension, heart disease, and type 2 diabetes. Epigenetic profiling, ie, analysis of epigenetic marks in individual patients, may be a complementary strategy to physiological profiling and DNA sequencing for targeting hypertension prevention and treatment strategies.”

The article was viewed more than 272,000 times in the first two weeks of publication during which the article was freely accessible.

Drs Kotchen and Liang contributed equally to the preparation of this article.

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