You may have often wondered why some people are described different drugs when they have the same problem. This is because people’s bodies react differently to the same drug. This is what makes issuing prescriptions dangerous. Until the prescription has been issued and the patient has tried the drug, how do they actually know it’s not going to make them worse just because others have been OK in the past?
A survey that was carried out by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2007 to 2010 showed that nearly half (49%) of all those living in the U.S. had taken at least one prescription drug in the past month, and nearly a quarter (22%) had taken three or more. But the range of different medicines that need to be issued for the same problem is huge, and as of yet, scientists are unsure as to why bodies react so differently.
However, researchers at the University of British Columbia have discovered that both genetic and environmental factors play a part in which drugs work well on us and which don’t during their study that exposed 6,000 strains of yeast to 3,000 drugs. They found there are around 50 different ways the yeast cells react to any given drug, which isn’t many considering. What this means is that one day it may be possible to use a person’s genome to predict the way they will respond to a particular drug and enable doctors to give the patient a more personalized prescription.
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