In this issue of the paper

In this issue of , the paper by Keogh-Brown et al. provides a timely analysis of the current and projected future impact of Alzheimer\'s Disease (AD) on the Chinese economy (). Projections of future costs are important for well-informed policy-making. Governments need to be aware of the impact of population ageing on their economies. Without reliable projections they cannot decide what measures to take in respect of different public programmes. This is especially important in the case of China: the country will experience an especially large change in its old age dependency ratio (ratio of older people to people of working age) due to a combination of rising life expectancy and low fertility rates. Although the one child policy has recently been removed, its effect on the Tedizolid HCl manufacturer of the population will persist over the coming decades.
Precision medicine, also known as stratified medicine or personalized medicine, aims to better target intervention to the individual, maximize benefit and minimize harm. Enthusiasm for the prospect of precision medicine has grown significantly in the last few years. There has been increasing interest in two streams of development in precision medicine. First is the integration of electronic medical records capturing longitudinal data and providing clinical phenotypes into decision making tools for precision medicine. Secondly, the advance in genomic medicine and pharmacogenomics research provides an expanding arsenal of genetic predictors of disease and health outcomes. Together these two streams provide a unique framework for an individualized diagnostic and therapeutic approach. Genetics has been a part of the health care system since introduction of the newborn screening in the 1960s, now it has become a priority area for prevention and treatment of common chronic diseases such as cancer and heart diseases (). In cancer research, personalized medicine based on genomics and pharmacogenomics is expanding rapidly. Other chronic diseases, such as diabetes and neurodegenerative diseases have widened their horizons and included precision medicine in their research strategies. Inflammation appears in a wide spectrum of diseases and has a very heterogeneous phenotype, including autoimmune diseases such as systemic lupus erythematosus and rheumatoid arthritis to autoinflammatory diseases and immunodysregulatory diseases such as secondary hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis. In the last 25years, the understanding of inflammatory diseases has dramatically increased and changed our approach to treatment. Initially these under-recognized childhood and adult diseases were associated with high burden of disease and associated high mortality rates. In rheumatoid arthritis, the single discovery of the cytokine TNF-alpha has changed a joint-destructing debilitating disease refractory to treatment into a well-controlled disease (). Inflammatory brain diseases are a relatively new area of inflammation, but have a vastly expanding spectrum of diseases. Inflammatory brain diseases, including infectious meningitis, encephalitis, vasculitis, T-cell mediated inflammatory brain diseases, and demyelinating diseases are rare diseases and would benefit from a precision medicine approach. The spectrum of inflammatory brain diseases has rapidly expanded during the last decade and keeps expanding with new discoveries (). Diseases such as small vessel primary CNS vasculitis, previously only diagnosed on autopsy, are now increasingly recognized early in the disease course, before irreversible neurological deficits are developed. One of the big challenges in inflammatory brain diseases is the overlapping clinical phenotype and absence of genetic markers and disease specific biomarkers for most diseases. , developed a scoring system to evaluate brain MRIs of children with demyelinating diseases. The scoring tool was tested on MRIs of patients with demyelinating diseases (acute disseminated encephalomyelitis (ADEM) and multiple sclerosis (MS)) and small vessel CNS vasculitis because these disorders share clinical features rendering accurate diagnosis challenging at onset. Although the inter-rater agreement of many features was acceptable, there were items that demonstrated acceptable inter-rater agreement but did not aid in differentiating ADEM, MS and small vessel CNS vasculitis on MRI. These authors made a significant step towards precision medicine, but other factors must to be added to the equation before barriers in diagnosing these diseases are lifted.