NIH Chief on Comparative Effectives Research, Health Reform and Personalized Medicine
Physician-geneticist Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, was interviewed by Kaiser Health News. He spoke about comparative effectiveness research, health reform and lowering healthcare costs. He also spoke about the effect of knowing your genetic risks.
"It did affect me to find out that I was at risk for diabetes, which I had no family history of. But my family has all been extremely lean and I was not so lean, as I discovered when I got this information," Collins says.
The "wake-up call" led Collins to switch up his diet and start an exercise program. His efforts helped him drop 25 pounds. Collins considers this type of personalization of medical recommendations as "part of the solution to the current confusion" over medicine. "You wouldn't go into the shoe store and just pick shoes off the rack without noticing if they were your size and yet, oftentimes with medical recommendations, that's kind of what we've had to do because it was the best information we had," Collins says.
"Don't smoke, exercise, eat right. But we all are pretty good at ignoring that. And this was a bit of an opportunity for a wake up call. Maybe you're not immortal or maybe your DNA is not perfect. Maybe you might want to adjust a few things to give you a better chance at a long life. I wrote about this in this book on personalized medicine, which was my 'full monty' about my own DNA," he said.
