Personalised Medicine Flashcards

1️⃣ Familiarise yourself with the flashcards:

  • Look through all the flashcards to see what's on both sides.
  • Make sure you understand the information on each card. If something's unclear, click the link to the revision notes at the bottom of the page for more details.

2️⃣ Test yourself:

  • Look at the question or prompt on each card and try to remember the answer before flipping it over.
  • Check the answer and make a note of any cards you find challenging and need to go over more.

3️⃣ Consistently Review and Practice:

  • Use spaced repetition: spend more time on the cards you struggle with and go over them more often.
  • Regularly review all the flashcards to help you better understand and retain the information over time.

Note: We may include questions that have multiple correct answers. It's useful to remember specific examples to understand these concepts better.

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What is personalised medicine?

Personalised medicine is when doctors use information about your genes, and sometimes your lifestyle, to choose the best treatment for you.

Which main type of information do doctors need to use personalised medicine?

They need information about your genome, such as which alleles you have for certain genes.

Why can people with the same disease need different medicines or doses?

Because they can have different alleles, which make them respond to medicines in different ways.

How can personalised medicine help reduce side effects from drugs?

By choosing a drug and dose that fit a person’s genes, doctors can avoid medicines that are more likely to cause them side effects.

How can personalised medicine make treatments more effective?

It can help doctors pick a medicine that is more likely to work well for that person’s specific form of the disease.

What is one example of how personalised medicine is used in cancer treatment?

Cancer cells can be tested for certain gene changes, and doctors then choose a drug that targets cells with those changes.

Why has the idea of personalised medicine become possible only recently?

Because reading whole genomes has become faster and cheaper, so we can now study many people’s DNA and link genes to drug responses.

Give one practical problem with using personalised medicine for everyone.

Testing people’s genomes and planning treatments can be very expensive and may not be available in all hospitals.

Why is storing genetic data for personalised medicine a privacy issue?

A person’s genetic data is very personal, and there is a risk that others, such as employers or insurers, could try to use it without permission.

Does personalised medicine work for all diseases yet?

No, for many diseases we do not yet know enough about which genes affect treatment, so standard medicines are still used.