Genetically customized living is where it’s at these days.
If ‘customization’ hit its apex in the first decade of 2000, then we’ve now entered an era of what I’m calling “core tailorization,” where personalizing programs, products and even our lifestyles go right to the heart of our DNA.
It’s not enough anymore to just eat well and exercise as much as humanly possible. It’s now actually about tapping into your genetic code to figure out how much and what you need to eat, coupled with how much and what kind of exercise you need to engage in to look and feel your personal best.
My husband recently traded in his high-flying TV career to dedicate his life to training people this way. And turns out, a lot of us are actually eating less and exercising more than we need to (gotta love a good news story). It’s called Metabolic Training and it starts with a series of easy tests that measure all sorts of inherited traits, like the type and balance of your muscle fibre (slow twitch, fast twitch…), how many calories your body needs to maintain function, what kind of fuel your body tends to feed on most (fat, carbs…), along with a bunch of other physiological and lifestyle markers. All this to determine your genetic potential and how you can best reach it through the foods you eat, the exercise you engage in and how you live. For example, If your muscle composition favours “slow twitch,” you are genetically predisposed to get your maximum benefit from endurance activities like cycling and running, as opposed to fast start-and-stop activities like tennis or sprinting …
In the cancer world, living well before, during and after treatment, has been the new benchmark for some time. Key to living well with cancer is feeling confident and involved in your treatment decisions. It’s also about being treated for what you have or have again, not for what you don’t have or no longer have. Too often, however, these lines are blurred.
So let’s forget about finding a cure for breast cancer, for a moment, and think about the possibility of finding out if you (or your daughter, mother, sister, friend…) are cured after you’ve just undergone major surgery, months if not years of treatment and an entire lifestyle overhaul. Until now, time was the only real barometer for measuring remission or cure. If it doesn’t come back within five years, you’re looking good …
But what if your doctor could tell you, definitively, that you’re cancer-free? That you don’t have to do 8 rounds of chemo to get at what may or may not be there? What if there was a blood test that could find traces of your tumour’s DNA? What if the guesswork was taken out of the equation, eliminating major missteps in treatment?”
Sounds utopic, but according to Scientists at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center and Life Technologies, a Carlsbad, Calif.-based biotechnology company that has identified certain characteristics that make up the DNA of a tumour, blood can be tested after treatment to determine if these markers are still hanging around and to what extent.
"When we give a therapy like surgery or radiation, we have no good way of differentiating who was cured. It's becoming clearer with novel biomarkers like this," said Luis Diaz, a cancer specialist at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore in a Feb. 20 article published in the StarPheonix, included in the latest edition of The Underwire.
In addition to indicating how well a patient in responding to treatment, these blood tests would also alert doctors to a recurrence of cancer a lot quicker than traditional imaging tools that tend to spot more developed masses.
"This is really personalized medicine. This is not something off the shelf," said Dr. Bert Vogelstein of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in a Feb. 19 article in The Vancouver Sun, also included in the latest edition of The Underwire. "This is something that has to be designed for each individual patient."
Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about.
Check out Issue 9 of The Underwire to find out more about the tumour DNA discovery and other relevant news, like how an Aspirin a day can keep breast cancer at bay.
Best,
Alison
VP, Strategy, Marketing and Communication
If ‘customization’ hit its apex in the first decade of 2000, then we’ve now entered an era of what I’m calling “core tailorization,” where personalizing programs, products and even our lifestyles go right to the heart of our DNA.
It’s not enough anymore to just eat well and exercise as much as humanly possible. It’s now actually about tapping into your genetic code to figure out how much and what you need to eat, coupled with how much and what kind of exercise you need to engage in to look and feel your personal best.
My husband recently traded in his high-flying TV career to dedicate his life to training people this way. And turns out, a lot of us are actually eating less and exercising more than we need to (gotta love a good news story). It’s called Metabolic Training and it starts with a series of easy tests that measure all sorts of inherited traits, like the type and balance of your muscle fibre (slow twitch, fast twitch…), how many calories your body needs to maintain function, what kind of fuel your body tends to feed on most (fat, carbs…), along with a bunch of other physiological and lifestyle markers. All this to determine your genetic potential and how you can best reach it through the foods you eat, the exercise you engage in and how you live. For example, If your muscle composition favours “slow twitch,” you are genetically predisposed to get your maximum benefit from endurance activities like cycling and running, as opposed to fast start-and-stop activities like tennis or sprinting …
In the cancer world, living well before, during and after treatment, has been the new benchmark for some time. Key to living well with cancer is feeling confident and involved in your treatment decisions. It’s also about being treated for what you have or have again, not for what you don’t have or no longer have. Too often, however, these lines are blurred.
So let’s forget about finding a cure for breast cancer, for a moment, and think about the possibility of finding out if you (or your daughter, mother, sister, friend…) are cured after you’ve just undergone major surgery, months if not years of treatment and an entire lifestyle overhaul. Until now, time was the only real barometer for measuring remission or cure. If it doesn’t come back within five years, you’re looking good …
But what if your doctor could tell you, definitively, that you’re cancer-free? That you don’t have to do 8 rounds of chemo to get at what may or may not be there? What if there was a blood test that could find traces of your tumour’s DNA? What if the guesswork was taken out of the equation, eliminating major missteps in treatment?”
Sounds utopic, but according to Scientists at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center and Life Technologies, a Carlsbad, Calif.-based biotechnology company that has identified certain characteristics that make up the DNA of a tumour, blood can be tested after treatment to determine if these markers are still hanging around and to what extent.
"When we give a therapy like surgery or radiation, we have no good way of differentiating who was cured. It's becoming clearer with novel biomarkers like this," said Luis Diaz, a cancer specialist at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore in a Feb. 20 article published in the StarPheonix, included in the latest edition of The Underwire.
In addition to indicating how well a patient in responding to treatment, these blood tests would also alert doctors to a recurrence of cancer a lot quicker than traditional imaging tools that tend to spot more developed masses.
"This is really personalized medicine. This is not something off the shelf," said Dr. Bert Vogelstein of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in a Feb. 19 article in The Vancouver Sun, also included in the latest edition of The Underwire. "This is something that has to be designed for each individual patient."
Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about.
Check out Issue 9 of The Underwire to find out more about the tumour DNA discovery and other relevant news, like how an Aspirin a day can keep breast cancer at bay.
Best,
Alison
VP, Strategy, Marketing and Communication
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar