On the road to personalised and precision geomedicine: medical geology and a renewed call for interdisciplinarity
File(s)
Published version
Author(s)
Kamel Boulos, MN
Le Blond, JS
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Our health depends on where we currently live, as well as on where we have lived in the past and for how long in each place. An individual’s place history is particularly relevant in conditions with long latency between exposures and clinical manifestations, as is the case in many types of cancer and chronic conditions. A patient’s geographic history should routinely be considered by physicians when diagnosing and treating individual patients. It can provide useful contextual environmental information (and the corresponding health risks) about the patient, and should thus form an essential part of every electronic patient/health record. Medical geology investigations, in their attempt to document the complex relationships between the environment and human health, typically involve a multitude of disciplines and expertise. Arguably, the spatial component is the one factor that ties in all these disciplines together in medical geology studies. In a general sense, epidemiology, statistical genetics, geoscience, geomedical engineering and public and environmental health informatics tend to study data in terms of populations, whereas medicine (including personalised and precision geomedicine, and lifestyle medicine), genetics, genomics, toxicology and biomedical/health informatics more likely work on individuals or some individual mechanism describing disease. This article introduces with examples the core concepts of medical geology and geomedicine. The ultimate goals of prediction, prevention and personalised treatment in the case of geology-dependent disease can only be realised through an intensive multiple-disciplinary approach, where the various relevant disciplines collaborate together and complement each other in additive (multidisciplinary), interactive (interdisciplinary) and holistic (transdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary) manners.
Date Issued
2016-01-28
Date Acceptance
2016-01-11
Citation
International Journal of Health Geographics, 2016, 15
ISSN
1476-072X
Publisher
BioMed Central
Journal / Book Title
International Journal of Health Geographics
Volume
15
Copyright Statement
© 2016 Kamel Boulos and Le Blond. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in
any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons
license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)
applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in
any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons
license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)
applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
License URL
Subjects
Public Health
1604 Human Geography
Publication Status
Published
Article Number
5