Predicting the Quality of Anticoagulation During Warfarin Therapy: The Basis for an Individualized Approach

摘要

“Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.”A quote attributed, although with some controversy, to the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, 1885–1962In medicine, there is an emerging tendency toward individualized medicine, that is, an approach to medicine based on available evidence, but enriched by the awareness of the inherent limitations of any “one size fits all” approach. As a matter of fact, diseases show individual differences with regard to onset and course, and individuals show different responses to drugs and interventions, thus suggesting the rationale for an individualized approach to disease treatments, able to predict individual responses. The most sophisticated approach to individualization and tailoring of medicine is personalized medicine, a broad and rapidly advancing field of health care that is informed by each person's unique clinical, genetic, genomic, and environmental information.