You may know a whole host of tips for living a healthy lifestyle: watch your weight, exercise, eat nutritious foods and don’t smoke, for example.
What if you could combine these lifestyle factors with a host of other variables to know your risk of developing specific diseases, to help detect and treat them early or prevent them altogether?
Dr. Victor Ortega, associate director of the Center for Individualized Medicine at the Mayo Clinic in the US state of Arizona, explains how science is moving ever closer to making such personal health predictions .
Previously inconceivable, such personal guides to well-being are becoming increasingly possible thanks to new and sophisticated technologies that capture data spanning entire genomes – complete sets of genetic material, or DNA – of our bodies, says Ortega .
