HealthSmart: Precision Medicine

• Keira McGuire
  BioRecent Stories

  

  Keira McGuire is a health reporter and multimedia producer for WITF. She hosts and produces Transforming Health television programs as well as other shows and documentaries for WITF’s Original Productions. McGuire produced the Emmy Award winning series HealthSmart for the last ten years. Keira previously worked at WBFF in Baltimore and WMDT in Salisbury as a reporter and anchor. She’s a graduate of Towson University.

 
Just a half-century ago, very little was known about the genetic factors that contribute to human disease.

In fact, in many cases, doctors and patients were forced to react to disease rather than prevent it.  Today, genetic testing is available for over 2000 rare and common conditions allowing parents to screen children for genetic abnormalities and individuals to analyze their risk of developing certain diseases.

It’s all adding up to what’s been deemed as precision medicine.  It’s an emerging approach for disease treatment and prevention that takes into account individual variability in genes, environment, and lifestyle for each person.

On HealthSmart: Precision Medicine we’ll talk the benefits and possible risks associated with genetic testing.  What are we able to test for?  And what’s on the horizon.