Will doctors be able to catch diabetes earlier, years before symptoms start?

• A newly published perspective article examines the future of preventive healthcare enabled by technological advances.
• The authors argue that multiple relatively minor factors converge to cause serious chronic conditions such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and dementia.
• Rather than waiting for signs and symptoms to appear, they believe a tech-led, proactive approach could help people stay healthier for longer.

Published in Cell Systems, a new perspective article calls for a paradigm shift in how medicine approaches chronic disease.

The main thrust of the paper is summarized by the paper’s lead author, Noa Rappaport, PhD, lead author of the paper and associate research professor at the Buck Institute:

“Medicine has traditionally focused on treating disease after symptoms appear. Our goal is to shift toward protecting health by identifying risk earlier and understanding how each person’s biology changes over time.”