Health Equity, Precision Medicine, and African American Men's Health

Realizing the promise of providing the right dose, of the right treatment, to the right patient requires broadening the conception of precision medicine. While often it is equated with genomic medicine, the precision medicine principles of personalization, precision, and individualization can be applied to other forms of health intervention such as behavior change and public health. In fact, there is a long tradition of using similar information from research participants in health communications. In this presentation, Dr. Griffith will make this argument and use examples from his work integrating precision medicine and individually-tailored health communications to change behavior and control the weight of middle-aged and older African American men. He will argue that the promise of precision medicine is not only in genomics, but also in creating interventions that refine efforts to mitigate how racism and other social determinants of health affect specific populations like African American men.