Genetic counselling for personalised medicine

Personalised medicine as an approach aims to take into account not only the individual’s personal medical history, their family’s history of disease and their ethnicity or ancestry, but also in addition their genetic constitution and their pattern of accumulated environmental exposures. Indeed, the consideration of family history and ancestry may become much less relevant once (eventually) an individual’s genetic constitution can be assessed as a whole. We consider past, contemporary and possible future approaches to the personalisation of health care and genetic counselling in the light of developments in genetic medicine.