Abstract

PERSONALIZED MEDICINE IN NEUROLOGICAL PRACTICE; FOCUS ON MIGRAINES:

*Balarabe S. A. and Maiyaki A. S.

ABSTRACT

Background: Scientific advancements offer the potential to define an individual's risk based on their genetic make-up as well as the contribution of genes, proteins, and metabolic pathways to human physiology and variations of these pathways that can lead to disease susceptibility. It is hoped that these fields will enable new approaches to diagnosis, drug development, and individualized therapy through the principle of personalized medicine. Personalized Medicine entails that managing a patient's health should be based on the individual patient's specific characteristics, including age, gender, height, weight, diet and environment. Additionally, personalized medicine allow for preventive measures such as lifestyle modifications, earlier screening, or use of prophylactic medications. Clinical assessment of patients with suspected neurological disease reveal a highly variable relationship between location, type of the lesion, nature of the lesion and the consequent functional deficit. As such, there currently exists no reliable framework for correlating neuronal injury to functional deficit that sufficiently explains the observed variation or predicts recovery. However, it is a well known fact that focal damage to the brain results in disruption of a distributed network of connections originating in the damaged region(s), suggesting that some of the variations may be due to a network response. This is where personalized medicine is linked to neurological practice. Consequently, this review, tends to shed more light on the important roles of genomic information applied in personalized care of patients with migraine.

Keywords: Migraines, Personalized medicine, Neurological practice, Genetics, Pharmacogenomics, Precision medicine.