Personalized Medicine, Personal Choices

March 27, 2015 | Angelina Jolie's decisions to undergo a preventive mastectomy and, now, oophorectomy have been credited with drawing greater public attention to genetic testing and personalized medicine, but David Grainger, writing at Forbes, points out that they also underscore the increasingly high burden that will be placed on ordinary people in the future to make sensitive choices about their own health. Genomic medicine will continue to turn up new risk factors for serious diseases, many of them more complex and subtle than the BRCA1 mutations that drove Jolie's own decisions, and the best path forward for patients will rarely be clear. Forbes