On the road to personalised and precision geomedicine: medical geology and a renewed call for interdisciplinarity

International Journal of Health Geographics
Maged N Kamel Boulos, Jennifer Le Blond

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, genom...Continue Reading

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Citations

Jan 22, 2017·Environmental Science and Pollution Research International·Olivier NúñezGonzalo López-Abente
May 3, 2019·International Journal of Health Geographics·Maged N Kamel BoulosTrang VoPham

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Software Mentioned

TOXMAP
Map
Geomedicine
Haz
My Place History
Windows

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